NOE VENABLE RETURNS your gaze with a precision approaching sonar, like she's dredging you for buried treasure. "People used to beat me up for staring," she confides. "I mean, it sucks for kids with staring problems." The Castro District native is coming to terms with the reversal that currently characterizes her life. "When someone keeps staring at you, you can sort of understand the impulse," the self-possessed 23-year-old folk and blues chanteuse says. "I just try not to fall down."
A champion of the frayed and fatalist vein of the weird American folk song, Venable uses a gritty storytelling lyricism and a bluesy soprano to trip audiences into narcotic devil's-at-the-crossroads consciousness. The fact that she's generally dressed in homage to one bygone age or another doesn't hurt and may explain some of the icons she evokes -- Marlene Dietrich, Flannery O'Connor, Barbra Streisand.
Venable began playing guitar and writing songs while laid up in bed with mononucleosis during her short stint at Bennington College. After dropping out, she returned to San Francisco and threw herself into the billowing open mic coffeehouse scene. There she met producer-guitarist Tom Meshishenek, who recalls being "blown away" by the then 19-year-old tenderfoot. Over the next year, the two made a primitive CD in Meshishenek's basement studio, while under siege by musician and industry types eager to work with a potential phenom. One industry type was producer Lee Townsend, whose production credits include Bill Frisell and Elvis Costello.
Townsend subsequently brought Venable and Meshishenek into the studio. Along with violinist Alan Lin, drummer Scott Amendola, bassist Viktor Krauss, keyboardist Rob Burger, and pedal steel player Ryan Rosenberg, they made a sprawling, baroque album, No Curses Here, which was quickly snapped up by Intuition, a German label. Intuition, in turn, lost its American distribution deal, which indefinitely postponed the planned May '99 stateside release, restricting the album's availability to live shows and Venable's Web site (www.zot.net).
Venable's songs explore the margins of American geography -- bone-dry dirt roads and steamy, surreal street scenes -- through the eyes of the lost, damaged, or just plain demented. Taking her cues from definitive and spectral voices -- Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Leadbelly, Robert Johnson, Kurt Weill, David Bowie -- she's adept in a hyperlanguage of despair and empathy. "Maybe our ears get deeper and deeper till a 'You ain't worth my boot' won't ever land / Maybe I touch his ice to notice the heat of my own hand," she sings on the album's centerpiece, "The Man with the Disease."
Perhaps in private tribute, chocolate and canine metaphors consistently find their way into various places ("Come on man, I'm a dog, you're a dog," she says by way of explanation). Unlike her navel-gazing musical cousins, Venable is not beholden to the blood-sucking bug of self-confession. "Love usually makes me all blathery and soupy and I say the same boring clichés," she says with some disdain. Still, No Curses Here proves she's not inarticulate in the presence of love's evil twin.
"Here's a sadness as shapely as you / I drink to the hope that you drink to me too," she croons on the epic and rambling "Paint Mine Blue." The jazz-tinged "Broken Bird, Broken Bird" is simultaneously breezy and urgent "Mr. Viper" takes the listener down a dank trail of incest-taboo. "I guess it's like lust," she says of writing songs. "You just see one you want and grab it."
She infuses her live performances with the same single-mindedness -- a feral intensity -- whether she's trolling over her acoustic trio (including Lin on violin and Todd Sickafoose on upright bass) or soaring over the prog-blues squall of her full band, the Ruiners (which includes Amendola on drums and Morris Acevedo on guitar). At best, a Venable performance -- whimsical, funny, impulsive, rapturous -- posits the idea of a darkly creative genius flailing away under the vaudevillian's tux and tails. Sneaking swigs from a flask of peppermint schnapps, she's delirious from the power of her warring impulses.
|
