By: Max Sparber
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| Lucy Michelle and the Velvet Lapelles - Photo by Ben Lansky |
Lucy Michelle, who has started to get a lot of attention from the local media, is a small, pretty woman with blond hair that, if photos from her MySpace page are to be believed, was brunette until recently. She wore red lace on her hair this past Friday, and a billowy white skirt, and a black top covered with black lace, and she spent several hours scurrying around the Bedlam Theater in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood. It was the release party for her CD, titled Orange Peels & Rattlesnakes. The CD is yellow and hand-printed—it has the feel of rough cardboard and finger paints. The CD has been wedged into a too-small plastic container, and comes out with a struggle, but once the case it opened it reveals an image of Ms. Michelle with her hair flowing backwards and upwards, woven with flowers.
Several bands opened for Michelle and her band, the Velvet Lapelles—specifically, Bouncer Fighter, Tentacle Boy and Military Special. I mention this in passing, as I was not at the Bedlam to see them, but instead to see Lucy Michelle. I had first caught her act a month before at a genuine freak show in St. Paul, and was not sure whether she was an opening act or part of the freak show itself. Not that there is anything especially freakish about Lucy Michelle or her Velvet Lapelles, but she plays ukulele and sings in a sort of punkish mix of Billie Holiday and Katharine Whalen, and her band includes an accordion, a cello and a bull fiddle. Additionally, her music seems to draw heavily from small swing combos from the ‘30s, with arch and melancholy melodies that borrows from the great American songbook of popular jazz. So the band did not seem freakish, precisely, but their music seemed to fit a freak show.
Throughout the opening acts, members of the Velvet Lapelles lounged around in the Bedlam's bar space. Lucy Michelle herself went from table to table, greeting people she knew, including an entire group that seemed to be made up of family. As the evening progressed, the Bedlam grew more crowded and hotter. By the time Lucy Michelle and her band took the stage, it was 10:00 and the theater felt like a hothouse. Fans pressed themselves against the stage, standing shoulder to shoulder, an eclectic collection of West Bank lefties, punks, IT nerds and a small selection of fans who looked as though they had tumbled off the screen of a silent movie and wandered around Minneapolis, confused, until they heard Lucy Michelle's music, and it sounded familiar.
Let's talk about the songs on Michelle's CD, which comprised the bulk of her performance that evening. The CD contains 10 songs, which, once upon a time, was how many songs every album had, or less, if one of the songs contained an especially long drum solo. Now, 10 songs seem a little skimpy for an entire CD, but there's little filler here—the selection on Orange Peels & Rattlesnakes represents a smart and well-crafted selection of songs. Michelle's lyrics tend toward the stream of consciousness, such as these first lines from her song "With You:" "I forget the day I forget the time I forget my mind darling when I'm with you." I suppose I could break these lyrics up onto separate lines and they would read a little clearer, but Lucy Michelle doesn't do so on her lyric sheet, so I don't see why I should have to, and writing them as just one running jumble like this represents the way she sings them quite well. Over a spare ukulele figure, she sings these lyrics to a plaintive melody, and when she reaches the break between one chord and another, she has a tendency to just let her voice hang, slightly breathless, and with a hint of vibrato for a moment—"I forget the daaaaaaaaay I forget the tiiiiiiime ..." etc.
While this particular song is deliberately under-produced, relying on Michelle's ukulele, voice, whistle (she whistles well, and often) and a hint of piano, other songs take fuller advantage of the unusual band she has put together. While her lyrics and vocals might cling together like a series of thoughts that haven't completely disentangled themselves from each other, the songs themselves are rather exquisitely produced, relying on the band to build a clear structure around the song. For example, in the song "Traffic," Michelle plays a fairly continuous finger-picking pattern on her ukulele, and at first, that's all you hear, but for some rather vigorous handclaps from the band. After the first two bars of the song however, the entire band joins in, with guitar, lilting background moans and a piercing drummed backbeat. Between the verses, the cello and bass join together for what sounds a bit like a Phillip Glass composition, which Lucy Michelle then joins in. The song is, in this way, neatly chopped up into individual sections, each distinct from the other, despite the fact the Lucy Michelle herself is, for the most part, singing the same melody throughout.
So why am I focusing on the smart production of the CD when I am writing for How Was the Show? Because Lucy Michelle & The Velvet Lapelles sound virtually identical live as they do on the CD—keeping the recorded arrangement. The lone difference I could hear was that Lucy Michelle herself seems to have trouble reaching her upper register when she sings live, and so sometimes just tends to shout her own lyrics, which is unexpected, given the preciousness of the styles of music she draws from, but not unwelcome. Her music runs the risk of being a little too mannered or twee—especially when one of her songs is taken from the writings of the supremely mannered poet and cartoonist Edward Gorey. Especially when, as with this performance, the band plays next to a screen, upon which is projected images from experimental European animation—I'm fairly sure I saw clips from Jan Svankmajer's “Alice.” Instead, Lucy Michelle's occasional atonal shouting gives the songs a tougher quality, and sometimes her entire band joins in, all shouting her lyrics.
It didn't take too long for the Badlam to become over-hot, which may explain why audience members began to take off their pants and throw them on the stage. Neither Lucy Michelle not the Velvet Lapelles seemed to know how to react to the occasional pair of trousers that landed before them. Briefly, the guitarist paused to throw a pair of jeans back to the audience. It came right back to him.
Location Info:
Bedlam Theatre
Artist Info: Lucy Michelle
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