Hail: Gypsy Cat & Gypsy Bird Review

 

Hail: Gypsy Cat & Gypsy Bird (Prolific/US)LP – a review first printed in Waste Paper, #23 – 1/1989

 

‘One must have a mind of winter…’

Wallace Stevens

*****

A work of unfathomable sorrow and bitterness, GC&GB is a collection of songs that arise out of that moment that connects the cat and bird as one pounces and one tenses for the flight that will either save it or come too late.

It is the moment of encounter when fate spreads its claws and the night widens like mouth armed with a million teeth, a universe waiting to swallow any or all of us, and not a sound left, not a word, not a note – only the sudden, engulfing loneliness and the terrifying precision with which we begin to measure the sadness of our survival.

Susanne Lewis’ voice has a coldness – it is indeed ‘the mind of winter’ – a harsh, brittle clarity that freezes out all sentimentality and pathos, describing in its chill timbre and icy control the figures that make up the world around us: the ones that we cannot escape and the ones that escape us.

The writing has the fractured grace and broken syntax of dreams lying at the edge of desire and fear, ‘a sleep of madness / (that) has wings and a melody / cloak and daggering.’ Her effort is to ‘lead you / towards your dreams / where everything comes / back again’: all the pain, longing and desperation that seem to be the necessary outcome of the simple act of loving.

The music is dry, distant and brutally casual, an harmonics of collapse and evasion that is never quite in tune with our expectations, twisting the scale of sounds to fit the needs of what is being said rather than the more conventional opposite.

Susanne Lewis and Bob Drake, musicians of long standing here in Denver, have made a remarkable lp that fulfills in spades the scattered brilliance of their earlier efforts as Corpses As Bedmates. GYPSY CAT & GYPSY BIRD is, admittedly, a difficult work that exhausts the listener with its cold visions of those entropies of the heart that seem to seep into all our relationships just when we want them to be their most perfect. But it is this very complexity that gives these wild and shaken words their great power in describing so accurately the landscapes in which we act out our dramas of love and loss.

Highly Recommended.

*****