Now Playing: Don McLean--"Vincent"
Hello Stranger is coming to the Blind Pig on the 19th of September, 2006. Until a few days ago, I didn't understand what exactly "that" entailed. I've now heard their eponymous debut, and can safely say that they make the Beatles look like Warrant. Brian Wilson look like Jim Stafford. Goya like Boris Vallejo. Hogarth like Bill Keane... in all seriousness, though, they're pretty damn good if I say so myself. My friend and Planned Parenthood volunteer coordinator Jessica Ross knows the guitarist, listed on the album as "Jared Nelson Smith," and enlisted me in flyering duties last weekend, so I decided to acquaint myself with their oeuvre.
The band also includes singer Juliette Commagere and drummer Joachim Cooder, both of whom split keyboard duties. Moving past the album cover, which looks like a cross between Nicolai Roerich's haunting oil landscapes of Soviet Central Asia and one of those demented dawbs found in Saddam Hussein's palace, we have a collection of songs that was actually much better than I expected. There's lots of keyboard, which comes close to making this an 80s-retro thing. Fortunately, Hello Stranger manage to combine this seeming fondness for older music with a very fresh, danceable, hook-laden sound. I hate to use the device of incorporating other bands via tortuous relationships in order to describe a group, but it really can't be helped.* They remind me a little of the Casionauts with a little more melody and a lot less thrash, with a throaty female lead vocalist. I want to say that Commagere's voice reminds me of Neko Case, but I'm not sure that's right.** It's a good'un, though, no doubt about it. The songs range from the fast-paced lure of "Robody" to the slow lament of "Kubrick Eyes" to the Spanish language nuevo-disco of "Es Tu Vida." As I said, they're playing in a week with the Great Fiction and Woodward, so it'll be interesting to find if Hello Stranger rise to the recorded level of this terrific debut.
*"Okay, so it's like Elliott Smith and Prince are getting stoned and watching Royal Tenenbaums in Rilo Kiley's apartment, and Maurice Jarrre's paying the pizza guy--and the pizza guy's Doug Kershaw!! If that happened, it'd be a lot like Hello Stranger. Or not."
**And leads to those associational atrocities again--"Flavor of Neko Case with smoky hints of Beth Orton and just a suggestion of Vashti Bunyan"--you get the idea.