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Beyond Curiosity, Caressing the Pain
by Chris Barry
How fitting I think as I type this with the relentless horror-slaught '28 Days Later' on HBO in the background; When I first heard Nicki Jaine in 2001, I saw her as having more than a touch of '30's chanteuse noir, with a mix of seedy-suave Berlin characters from Cabaret slavishly worshipping at her feet.
At the time, I also said her music brought me to "psycho-aural hallucinations of Piaf, Ani Difranco and Daisy Clover morphed into one". And more so today, as Nicki's material could be background music in a Roaring 20's Gothic cabaret, with her deeply entrancing voice bringing echoes of Marlene Dietrich meets Nico as arranged by Tim Burton and Lotte Lenya. And she's gone from a solo act to a duo, a band {the late Torn paper Dolls}and with the release of her new album 'Of Pigeons and Other Curiosities", she's back to being a singer/songwriter with a plan and, oh yes, a vengeance.
She's shared stages with the likes of Voltaire, Unto Ashes, The Dresden Dolls, Carfax Abbey and The Empire Hideous, and although she currently resides in Philadelphia, Nicki Jaine is Asbury Park born and bred, and credits her grandmother with kickstarting her songwriting talents when she gave Nicki a guitar on her 14th birthday.
A 3-time Asbury Music Awards nominee, she started out strumming at open mikes around Red Bank and more recently she began playing piano, and now the ivories are an essential aspect of her sound.
So we sat down with Nicki Jaine's new CD and let her persona just take us over...
She brings that timeless chanteuse vibe up front to 'The Sound of Girls', which carries her cooly vulnerable voice over cabaret piano plonking while she sings of 'the sound of girls breaking', bringing basic Goth 'elan to this edgy but uncomplicated song. As Jaine 'takes home the remains of what was', still relishing her resolve and the perversely joyful release she finds in loss.
While a bluesy, barrelhouse piano style arrangement drives 'Pretty Faces', about "..Pretty people so devoid of substance", as Nicki blithely rejects "all the evils that mother warns us' and all 'the pretty boys and pretty girls' roll dismissively off her lips with her own retro-noir, neo-nursery rhyme intensity. And the toylike yet poignant piano tones that intro 'Should have known' about a boy who dismays her sum up her childlike yet determined edge, asserting that 'you won't see me leave 'till I get what I came for...' while she assures us that 'I really don't care if these little boys break'...
Both an angstful heartbreaker and viciously deft leveler of the fake, Jaine's signature song for my money vies between 'Pretty faces' and 'A pigeon named crow' where she informs you in almost spitting tone that "pretty little girls often grow up to be vicious liars", as she sinuously slithers and snarls though the song, exhorting you to 'smile now the flies are coming' because "no one stirs here but a pigeon named Crow'...
And picture a lover who 'knows so much trivia but you don't know me' and you have the dreamy sadness of the string/bass-sinewy 'Amsterdam', as she strolls with anguish and strides in triumph through the revealing aftermath of another doomed relationship.
And her bleakness is not only revealing but becomes somehow comforting amidst the little creature imagery and skin-creepy feel of 'Animals Crawling'; She acknowledges beauty in the world 'although today it escapes me', within the crashing riffs and odd-clockworks drum riffs of 'Octopi'; Nicki reminds you that any 'hopefulness will not deceive me', as her pseudo-frantic vocal dubs buffet and echo her fear, making it more palpable and closer to hysteria. She celebrates more pain and isolation in the starkly angry 'Antartica', as her vocal slithers in between the churning, space-calliope keyboard sound of the song's mainriff, which you'll remember vividly like a childhood trip to the most soul-chilling part of Wallyworld. While she paints a picture of the perfect emotional train wreck on 'Disaster you're beautiful'; No mere Queen of Bleak, Jaine loves to dispense edgy truths like 'beauty is skindeep but madness is catching', as she endures and revels in the best of the worst of a lover, breathily intoning that 'you're nothing short of disaster...you're nothing short of...the fears in my mind!' Because even bleakness and insanity can be...so aesthetically perfect.
Nicki's new album is also the first release from Philadelphia-based Indy label Shaman Records, and many of the songs on the 11 song disc were previously released on demos or samplers in a more acoustic mode. But for 'Pigeons' she used various session musicians like bassist Mike Stang and drummer Mark Bohn of Harrisburg, PA's Hiersosonic, from the Lollapalooza 2003 tour. Kerry Smith from Anathema Device wrote string arrangements for the song 'Amsterdam', played by cellist Jeanne LeBlance and violinists Sandra Park and Junsun Yoo. While Noel Gevers played Hammond organ on 'One more show', Rosemary Ostrowski sung all backing vocals and guitarist Jarred Cannon and cellist Allanah Irwin played on various tracks.
All told, the album presents Jaine's darkly vivid imagery and explosively naked psyche with a near-surgical precision. With this record, she's on her way to becoming an Entity, headed for at least a healthy cult following, and for my money has a fair stab at becoming the new dark darling for all those obsessively fawning Goth girls and boys who may be growing jaded with Marilyn Manson and Trent Reznor. And that may only be the tip of her fanbase iceberg.
Upstage Magazine
June 2004