 "There's
a certain feeling, and it seems like a very modern feeling among people
I know, to just be in a constant state of quitting," says Rasputina frontwoman
Melora Craeger when asked about the title of there new album, "How We
Quit The Forest."
"It would be the present tense, rather than you have quit and something's over," she explains. "But to maintain a state of quitting, to go from quitting one thing to the other, from quitting smoking to quitting a relationship, quitting things in your diet. That's a strange state, and imagining the forest as your society or your community. Just kind of taking yourself out of a scene or something while being in it." The concept of the forest is part of the main theme running through the disc. While Rasputina's first album, "Thanks For The Ether," dealt with historical situations and characters, the new album is based around fairy tales; how they're created and disemeninated, and "the secret meanings" behind them. Like in fairy tales, they wanted to treat animals as characters, something that carries over into the cover art. Melora says that musically the members of Rasputina have "a lot more knowledge and confidence" this time around. "With the first one, I would say that we were all kind of passive, not having done it before and not being very able to voice what we did know how to do," she explains. "On my own, I worked with lots of ways to record the cello, different systems of combining acoustic with distorted and stuff like that." The end result is an album that is much more varied sounding that
"Thanks For The Ether." Though it's nothing like the It also means the Rasputina are even more difficult to classify. They don't like being thought of as a goth band, because, as Melora puts it, "we don't wear back, we wear white." "I feel that mainly it's about different age groups," Melora adds. "We played club shows in New York for a long time. And the NY audience tends to be older, more sophisticated. We assumed that's what a music audience is. But I think it's only just NY, with all the touring the bigger the audience, the younger the audience was. I really, really loved that. It seems like a very open audience, and an audience that you can affect, rather than being judgmental and bitter. So maybe if we did a nursery school tour .." For more information on this or another artist, try searching Sonicnet!
© 1998 Bob Gourley |
