Rasputina @ The Knitting Factory

| Print | E-mail

Friday, 18 September 2009 12:05

The Knitting Factory's new location in Brooklyn may be in its infancy, but there are few better choices to help break it in than Melora Creager and her old, old soul -- hundreds of years old in fact, if you believe Rasputina's tongue-in-cheek claim to have been founded in 1891 rather than 1991. Ancient as she is, Creager managed to pull out the surprises even at Sunday's all-request show, even one whose playlist had been determined by solicited fan e-mails a month prior.

Rasputina, whose aesthetic is unapologetically stagy and put-on, right down to Creager's mystifying, off-and-on accent, which perhaps resembles Greta Garbo if she'd been raised on Mars. But Creager's virtuosity and her penchant for surprising lyrics, usually littered with obscure historical references (ranging from the Triangle Shirtwaist fire to medieval papal decrees), keep fans rapt. Especially nerve-wracking was the speculation on what songs would prove victorious from Creager's ample catalog, the most recent of which was 2004’s Frustration Plantation. A new release, Sister Kinderhook, is due out later this year. The set began with a version of "I Want to Marry a Lighthouse Keeper" from A Clockwork Orange, then "Diamond Mind" and "A New Zero" from the band's second full-length album, 1998’s How We Quit the Forest.

One is tempted to give Creager credit for her other choices of covers -- Tom Petty and John Fogerty, to be exact. "American Girl" just made me nostalgic for the original, although the band's dark, lumbering take on "Bad Moon Rising" is probably a much more intuitive interpretation than Fogerty's, actually. But when you think about it, what else would Creager do but reinterpret the classic rock FM playlist for the cello? Let's face it, A Clockwork Orange, is almost too easy.

The second (yes, second) encore didn't include the promised offering of Frustration's "Wicked Dickie," but songs that did surface proved tonic enough. One was the "Remnants of Percy Bass." "Nobody knows him like I do/I remember when there were things he could do," Creager croons simply, in an elegy for a lover and idol fallen. It was followed by the delicate, witchy lullabye of "Rusty the Skatemaker."

Rasputina has prided itself, since one-time Nirvana studio cellist Creager brought it to life in Brooklyn in 1991, on being unclassifiable by nature, gliding on its cracked steampunk aesthetic and its composition, at first, of female cellists and percussionists. The first male joined the roster in 2006, and current second chair Daniel DeJesus continues that tradition, resembling a tanned, bearded Tom Sawyer in a straw boater hat, subtly deferring to the Creager in all matters.

Creager herself resembled a kind of Norse warrior-queen, with silver robes flowing from her amply pregnant frame, red pin-on dreads mingling obviously with her own hair. The trio, now several generations removed from its original roster, has performed rarely in the past few year or so, with Creager choosing to focus on her family life. In fact, she is, as I write, heavily pregnant with her second child, whose existence proved a source of running patter throughout the night, Creager delighting in messing with the crowd's heads about the unborn's gender.

The sedentary nature of the cello has always provided Rasputina with a unique challenge to the keep up the energy onstage. But with Creager's eerily robotic joke delivery it's hard not stay rapt, out of love or terror, and the goth kids in the crowd did. The goth population may well not be as ample around these parts as they used to be (in this economy, maybe one can assume we're all miserable enough already). But Sunday at the Knitting Factory, with its shiny new paint job and understated decor (although it still somehow, like the previous incarnation in Tribeca, manages to be a maze of pointlessly confusing doors) the safety-pin set mustered admirably for Creager. Midway through, Creager proved willing to subvert the very formula that made her career and put down the cello in favor of a banjo, in what turned out to be an uncomfortably portentous preview of this year's bluegrass-influenced upcoming release, Sister Kinderhook. Of course, the crowd didn't know what to make of it. Then again, that's why they came.

- Claire Shefchik