SHORE WORLD
by Chris Barry
5/14/03
Who is Nicki Jaine and why does she play with Torn Paper Dolls?
A question on many lips, the following retro-perspective may better shed some light:
Until recently a solo act, Nicki Jaine is a performer who’s never left an audience less than riveted: With her cabaret noir style and a compelling to coquettish emotional nudity, Jaine is simply possessed of a timeless style within a voice that is just unexpected from such a vulnerable looking young woman.
Especially on the dark, gently relentless passion of her ‘Favorite Things’, or her eye on the wall delivery during the cryptically nourish tale of ‘A Pigeon named Crow’. Couple this w/her lyrical imagery of “animals crawling’ and a razor’s edge irony while wondering whether ‘’to make love or fuck in this over-priced room’, it brought me to psycho-aural hallucinations of Piaf, Lotte Lenya, Ani Difranco and Daisy Clover morphed into one…
Anyway, to get in the present tense, the Philadelphia based Nicki met her talented bassist/keyboardist and songwriting partner Sky while playing a solo gig; the two musicians felt an instant symbiosis together, and Torn Paper Dolls was born. With the addition of drummer Zach Russell, the band recently did their first recording for public consumption.
Jaine told us that the name Torn Paper Dolls “conjures an Edward Gorey/Tim Burton sort of dark imagery…”: So with Edward Scissorhands dancing to a Sisters of Mercy soundtrack in our heads, we listened to these Dolls’ new 3 song demo ‘Antarctica’ recently and found the darker, starker and angrier than ever Nicki to be amidst her most emotionally wrenching stuff to date; On title song ‘Antarctica’, tolling churchbells set the tempo as Nicki’s stark vocal etches a bleakly angry message to a former but still cold as ever lover; as the song erupts between angry industrial/goth riffs of retribution and Jaine’s voice over the chimes, you see the painfully ironic picture of a heart torn angrily asunder…
On the oddly dreamy to dirge-like ‘Fireflies and Razorblades’, Sky’s delicate, almost toy-like piano riffs underscore Nicki’s dark poetic lines {“some things are made...of fireflies and razorblades, some things are made…of ladybugs and pent-up rage”) and you get a real angst-eye view of Ms. Jaine’s inner psyche. Reminded me vocally of the old Care for The Cow sound, or if Nina Hagen met Liza Minnelli, drank some absinthe, went Goth and slashed themselves into a psychosexual frenzy with rose thorns.
‘Cuz Life’s a dark dancing carnival of duality, as Nicki literally skips, slithers and crawls through themes of loss, self-loathing and an almost nameless yearning; Last cut ‘She is the madman’ thrusts this intense self-feeding turmoil quietly but deeply into your face, with lines like ‘Inside’s a bitch, when there’s nothing to see’.
So the question that might matter here is; Is this just another self-destructively arty pose from a media-dubbed new Nico of The Millenium, or is this Torn Paper Doll really a healthy antithesis, in stark peer contrast to the pre-sweetened April Lavignes and Norah Jones of this world?
I err towards a synthesis of both, although Nicki’s sheerly timeless vocals and sometimes confusing appeal may just blow all that extrapolation off any pigeonholer’s map; they’re currently working on a 5 track EP with some live DVD footage from their CBGB’s shows called ‘Fireflies and Razorblades’. The EP was produced by Chris Shepherd, and its positioned for an early summer release.
While you can see these Torn Paper Dolls yourself and decide, this Saturday the 17th at The Broadway Central, So. Amboy 10 PM show.
East Coast Rocker
May 2003