Rasputina – The Lost & Found 2nd Edition – Review

Rasputina

The Lost & Found 2nd Edition (Instinct)
by Jamie Kiffel

What happens when that borrowed Led Zeppelin record you left on your windowsill all summer oozes onto your stereo turntable? What if your Creedence Clearwater Revival tape, the one that the slow kid buried out behind the sap house, grew four years’ worth of green-blue mold splotches and fermented its way into your tape deck? And what if, waltzing to the sinuous waft of rotting children’s books, your nursery rhymes crept out from their attic box and began to celebrate the decomposing cacophony? Haunted cellists Rasputina offer their dankly corset-ed Phantom of the Opera-esque renditions of these and more rock’n’roll favorites on The Lost and Found 2nd Edition (notably, the first edition must still be lost because it was never released).

CCR’s “Bad Moon Rising” sounds like a cemetery haunt in mourning for the 1970s. Led Zep’s “Rock & Roll” grins with ghoulish, minor-key delight. While most of these are little more than curious novelties, there are some corpsed and dressed covers here that stand quite stiffly on their own. Melora Creager’s version of “Wish You Were Here,” with its sighing vocals, sad strings, and fuzzed-out bass effect is stunning and could frankly break into the Top 40 if the right stations acknowledge it. Creager also covers a Marilyn Manson song, “Tourniquet,” turning its sound full and melodic with cello harmonies. “This Little Piggy,” a muffled rendition of the nursery rhyme, sounds like a scratched phonograph record playing against itself in fascinating syncopation.

The whole thing sounds like it was left on the package shelf of your car too long. Don’t try to return it to the library book drop, and marvel at the twisted beauty of musical decomposition.
(www.rasputina.com)