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Classic
Albums By Angela Pancella
After ominous piano chords, Karin Bergquist of Over the Rhine began singing, "What a beautiful piece of heartache this has all turned out to be." There can be no truer description of this song or the whole album Good Dog Bad Dog. It is a lovely kind of sad. It works well as bedtime music, gentle and lulling in the background, but close listening reveals moods as foreboding as the opening piano of that first track.
It's a sound from the same territory as the odd photographs in the CD booklet. They share sepia tones, shadows, blurs and fades, obscured faces. In a song like "Faithfully Dangerous" Bergquist's vocals evoke a wicked jazz singer from early in the last century, someone we might only see today in an old photograph. But the sound is not what you'd hear back then, just as the photograph would not be what you would have seen at the time. The photo acquires its enigmatic quality through the fading and discoloring of age; the music, too, uses its many years of distance to layer on its mystique. The mystique may be many-layered, but the sound itself is not. On the album notes Linford Detweiler (composer or co-composer of most of the tunes, as well as keyboard, guitar and bass player) tells of how these songs were sketches for an album never made. The band decided to release these "home recordings" as they were-"a backstreet bareboned mess of songs which had been outlined after dark in my thirdstory bedroom. These snapshots of the very first time Karin actually sang these songs into a microphone were usually made a few days after a song was written." With the exception of "Everyman's Daughter," which has a more standard production sheen, the songs on Good Dog Bad Dog have a nakedness to them-long passages will include nothing but Karin's voice and a piano or Karin's voice and a guitar. The intimacy and restraint is refreshing amidst a sea of overproduced, overwrought CDs; if more bands took this approach the world would be a better place. It so happens that these particular tunes are particularly suited to the barebones approach. I heard an a cappella singer explain once how his band chose songs to reinterpret in the vocals-only environment-the only songs that worked, he said, were ones in which the melodic information was concentrated on the vocal line. If the heart of the song was its guitar hook (think the Rolling Stones' "Satisfaction"), it wouldn't work a cappella. The songs on Over the Rhine put few instrumental pyrotechnics on display; Karin's voice needs the support of only a few softly strummed chords here and there. The empty spaces imply possible harmonies. The songs could stretch to fill in what's missing, but they don't need to. I've not said much yet about the lyrics. They are literate; "All I Need Is Everything," for example, has a higher BAPM (Biblical allusions per minute) count than even most U2 songs. Angels, shadows and hearts are recurring themes, but for the most part the images are, again, at their best when they are slightly out of focus-definitive meaning is trumped by conjured mood. "Happy to Be So" includes what could be one of my top favorite lines of any song. Its memorable metaphor cites a childhood game where one player tries to crash through a line formed by the opposing team: "If I try to pray, it's like a game of Red Rover. I take a real good run at it, yes I do, but I can't break through." This is not a recording that does much crashing or breaking. Instead, Good Dog Bad Dog seeps in slowly, just like its opening piano chords which sound like they were resonating long before the disc started to spin. And just as time left marks on the old photographs inside the booklet, Good Dog Bad Dog is likely to leave an indelible impression on the listeners who let these deep-running still waters seep into them. Angela Pancella was host of the radio show "The Eclectic Mix" for seven years, exposing unwary listeners to Spanish cover versions of Kraftwerk songs and counterpoetry opera. She is the author of Voice and Style: Marc Connors of The Nylons, the biography of a legendary a cappella singer. She writes regularly for @U2 (www.atu2.com), one of the top internet U2 fan sites. She is also one of the few people in this world who can list "beatnik" on her resume under "Past Employment Experience." Photos of Karen Bergquist by Steve Beard. |
When
I started working in radio, I had a theory about music based on observation
of my behavior. Since it would take me several listens to "get" most
songs or CDs, I assumed that if I had enough time, I could appreciate
anything I heard. Then my mailbox at the radio station started to
fill up with unsolicited CDs, and I began to understand. Maybe it
wasn't that I wasn't giving these CDs enough spins; maybe they just
weren't very good. As technology has advanced it has become easier
and easier for anyone/everyone to record and distribute their music.
Flocks of these undiscovered masterpieces winged their way to my mailbox,
where I eventually quit even trying to listen to them. 
Once--once!--I
stumbled on a genuine masterpiece in the stack of wish-they-weres.
I was in an apocalyptic mood that night, selecting songs for my show
that dealt with the end of the world. I noticed a disc in my box had
a song on it called "Latter Days" and thought, "Hm. This could fit."
I previewed it quickly, thought it sounded rather pretty, and stuck
it on the air. 
The
band takes its name from a predominantly German neighborhood in Cincinnati
(so German, the joke went, to cross into this territory meant going
"over the Rhine"). Perhaps I relate to the band's worldview because
I, too, grew up in a German area of a Midwestern city. Something about
Good Dog Bad Dog evokes a sense, not of place, but of the spirit of
a place, and the spirit is familiar to me. It's as if each city in
town has a soul, something that makes it unique. The soul cannot be
captured facilely with a camera or a curt description. Somehow Over
the Rhine has turned phrases and notes into a net to catch the deep
meaning of where they are. Call the result "mystical Midwestern."