I guess after five years of work, it shouldn’t be surprising that the album is both dense and expertly organized, with a fun-with-samples take in the middle for disconcerting comic relief in “Kitty’s Trapped in the Well,” and a special “bonus track” you might remember from the last presidential season: “Too Late for Whitey.” There’s variety here in genre, but the nakedly raw emotion is just about universal.
In the Rolling Stones rocker “I’m So Afraid,” Brahms is as honest and bare as any kindergartener, taking a naked accounting of fears: “I’m so afraid of losing my job/I’m so afraid of being robbed/Being raped/No escape/Being bored/And flipping out on the Doors/Love me two times baby.” It’s compressed into a perfect 1:59 track that finishes with this admission: “I’m so afraid of God falling down ... I’m shaking baby and it’s not from love/It’s from fear.”
The horse whinny at the finish is strangely appropriate.
Even if Brahms was never really that Little Bundle of Sugar (2000), it’s never been hard to be sweet on her. Now she’s let us closer than ever before and she’s never seemed sweeter. Though maybe she’s a hard candy.
And she probably wants to punch me in the face for that “sweet” nonsense.
NUMBER 4 | Released by Darien Brahms | with the Hot Tarts | at SPACE, in Portland | Sept 6
On the Web
www.myspace.com/darienbrahms
Sam Pfeifle can be reached at sam_pfeifle@yahoo.com.
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