Rasputina
Oh Perilous World
Filthy Bonnet, 2007
By Kayleigh Girard
While looking for new music back in high school, I stumbled across Rasputina, a cello-rock ensemble. Finding their CDs in my rural hometown wasn’t gonna happen, and this was back in those heady days of Napster, where hours of dial-up downloading only got me a few scattered tracks. So I more or less forgot about these guys until I got to college and started wishing that I’d chosen to play the cello instead of the flute. By then I’d moved to a bigger city, so I was able to nab a few Rasputina albums and fall in love with what I heard. The core of the band is lead singer Melora Creager, and on Oh Perilous World she is joined by drummer Jonathon TeBeest and second cello Sarah Bowman.
The most interesting thing about Oh Perilous World — and about all Rasputina albums, actually — is the way Rasputina has been able to move past the traditional sounds of their instruments and do something fresh with them. On songs like “Draconian Crackdown” and “Choose Me For Champion,” the cellos sound just like distorted electric guitar, and while the traditional cello sound is preserved on “Cage in a Cave,” the riffs are played in an upbeat, poppy style that would be hard to find on a classical recording. These varying styles aren’t so much the product of unusual or alternative performance techniques, but are mostly due to the arrangements, the way their songs incorporate the cello: the instrument is used not only for colour or mood-setting, but is given active, intricate parts. It’s also nice not to hear intonation trouble spots like there have been on previous Rasputina releases.
But unusual instrumentation isn’t Rasputina’s only distinctive feature: the band also seems more than a little obsessed with all things Victorian. They perform in corsets and write about historical subjects, some so obscure that they prompt a search on Wikipedia… which I love. The songs on Oh Perilous World aren’t just historical, though. They address a kind of alternative history that involves Mary Todd Lincoln (that’s right, Abe’s wife) as the Queen of Florida, who is involved in a dispute with the residents of Pitcairn Island, led by Thursday October Christian, the son of the mutineer Fletcher Christian. About half the tracks tackle this storyline, while the rest are about Hurricane Katrina, snail fever, child soldiers, and the “year without a summer” that occurred in 1816.
To make this even more complex, many of the songs have been interpreted as references to current events, especially those of the years since 9/11. Queen Mary Todd can be seen as a stand-in for the United States, and the Pitcairnians for the Middle East. And while I appreciate this extra layer of meaning, you don’t have to have a degree in history to appreciate the sweet cello sounds — although you might start to question the obsession with Pitcairn Island on an album that Creager described as a collection of songs inspired by the internet.
And although Melora Creager’s faux-British accent could use some work, Oh Perilous World is a great album full of unusual subject matter, dense arrangements, and some wicked cello playing. Go check out a few cuts on Rasputina’s Myspace.
