Here, you always get your come-uppance. “Friend” flows into a quick waltz, after a couple of minutes where you wonder whether you might have slipped in the Les Misérables soundtrack. The rhythm is held in the piano and cymbals while the keyboards lay down a string section that introduces a third movement with a minor-key fallout straight from the jazz songbook before the song finishes like a big ’80s ballad. Just when you thought “Lovely Lies” was your standard break-up tune, Cruella steps it up a notch: “I hate you, despise you, just leave me alone.”
Like Camera Obscura’s Tracyanne Campbell, though not as high in the register, Cruella is consistently able to get dark and moody with her content without being that way with her delivery. She and the songwriting combine to make seven-minute-plus tunes — say, “Nidhogg,” about the mythical Norse dragon known alternately as the tearer of corpses and the malice striker as it gnaws at the tree of life — seem almost like they end too soon. And they have further foresight not to put too many tracks on the disc or ask too much of their audience.
The final cut, “Little Lady Lillit,” is a sub-three-minute piece of dessert after seven main courses. With a piano like a music box, Cruella triples her vocals into a schoolyard chant about a girl who’s “evil through and through”; to “wreck and crumble, this is what she’d do.” It’s evil in a fun way, and it ends with a purposefully sour note and an infectious giggle.
Who says goths don’t know how to have fun?
Seas of Blood | Released by By Blood Alone, on Jericho Records | with Ogre + Big Coffin Hunters | at Geno’s, in Portland | Oct 27
|On the Web
By Blood Alone: www.bybloodalone.com
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Sam Pfeifle: sam_pfeifle@yahoo.com
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