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The
New Passion Club, by Linda Neil.
CD, 55 mins. Lula
Bliss Music, 2001. (The CD can be ordered through
the Website.) |
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Lula
Bliss is the alter ego of Brisbane-based performance artist,
writer and violinist Linda Neil, whose impressive list
of past projects includes a stint doing backing strings
for Ed Kuepper, who in fact happens to have recorded and
produced this jewel of an album, The New Passion Club.
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Beginning
with a shimmering violin that soon launches into an intimate
narrative overflowing with groaning machinery atmos, this
work is obviously a gem, a little beauty pill for your
brain. Bliss’s tone is childlike, but almost with the
quality of a medium, uttering things that sound surprising
even to herself. The Club she speaks of is a mysterious
group of artists and bohemians fleshed out through endearingly
witty lyrics and more than the odd ‘killer-one-liner’.
It is easy to be captivated by this creation that seems
all at once to have something very modern, yet a kind
of Brechtian gramophone DNA alive in its veins. |
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The album is driven by strong, recycled strings; solid,
nostalgic velvet-wrapped findings from somewhere at the
beginning of last century, yet definitely betraying it’s
contemporariness by way of the accompanying thick beats
and all the other tricks the young kids usually love,
but done better this time. Just like the sleeve suggests,
there’s plenty of stage-show feathers and costumes worn
by performers who may or may not change out of them when
they go to bed at night. They are somewhere between ragged
vaudeville vagrants and cold-hearted careerists. They’re
almost anthropomorphic; so tightly drawn yet glaringly
fantastic, and something in the skewed tone touts of a
horrid ‘teddy bear’s picnic’. |
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