Noe Venable’s voice has haunted me from the moment I heard it. Maybe I was just in a particularly melancholy mood, maybe a tad emotional, the kind of mental state that begs me to crawl into bed with a pint of ice cream and listen to Morrisey for hours on end. The good news is that my roommates don’t have to wear earplugs to tune out strains of “The More You Ignore Me” anymore. I have shared Noe Venable with them, and we can sit, melancholy and spacey together, one big happy family.
The Noe Venable Trio’s CD, a live recording of a performance at Mo’s Melody Mansion in San Francisco, is blissfully perfect. I assume the audience was equally entranced by the threesome as I only heard a cough once, and it was a weak cough at that. The trio is composed of Todd Sickafoose, stand-up bassist, Alan Lin, violinist, and Noe Venable on guitar and vocals. Their sound is rich and diverse, the violin weeping, the bass weaving behind and around the melody line, but sometimes just a low hum behind Noe’s vocals. With a child-like and earnest sing-song, she pours her lyrics into the raging pull and push of the bass and violin. Her lyrical topics range from the melancholy to the bizarre. At one point on the recording she explains her song Strange Companion is from the perspective of a car,
“a sexy little 1983 Mazda with those black plastic blinker lids over its baby whites... I’m like the Millennium falcon, I look like a plastic model of me. I shake and rattle, but I’m faster than I look... sometimes bad people happen to good cars, and sometimes bad people happen to bad people who have already happened to good cars.”
As a solo act, Noe has received praise from San Francisco’s leading arts and entertainment publications, for her music certainly, but specifically for her poetically written lyrics.
Listening to the Trio’s music requires one to dip their conscience into the whirl, and a willingness to go where it may, willy, nilly, topsy, turvy, naked or clothed.
Graciously, the Noe Venable trio will be making an appearance at the Arnada Cafe in Vancouver December 9th, all the way from San Francisco, for your listening pleasure. I suspect this will be the sort of performance where the random attendant will find themselves paralyzed at a booth, beer full and cigarette burning their fingers while visions of sugar plums and ‘83 Mazda’s dance in their heads....
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