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| After three cassette demos and numerous gigs throughout the city, the Novellas finally have a full-length release. Orson Welles would have loved this. Cinematic, ambitious in scope, and wearing a chilled elegance like the frost on a champagne glass, these twelve songs parade before the listener like esteemed guests at a grand hotel. At the core, the Novellas are songwriter Peter Chance on vocals and guitar, and arranger Laura Ogar on keyboards. Augmented by percussion, drums, and bass—with strings and trumpet added for flavor—the Novellas live up to their name as storytellers. No two tales are alike—in fact, the subject matter is wildly divergent. “The Drunken Toreador” is a melodrama about the slow, besotten demise of a bullfighter who has lost his nerve after being gored, “Nina” reports on the doings of a Russian parapsychic (skeptics insist she bends spoons using “hidden magnets in intimate places”), and alien abduction is the topic in “There Goes Betty Again” (Ogar uses a theremin for authentic ’50s tingle). |
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| What unites these seemingly fractious dramas is a glimmering presence of death, as illuminated by Ogar’s washes of sound alongside Chance’s startled-cat vocal phrasing. In this music, death doesn’t appear abruptly as the Grim Reaper—instead it’s with us every day, breathing an unspoken awareness of mortality into all that lives, rendering each moment of existence immediate, vivid and often painful. Sometimes death holds your hand, as in “Jack’s Lullaby” (that’s Jack Kevorkian), other times it introduces itself as a prequel for what’s to come: a demi-death as in “Graduation Day.” Whereas the norm in this genre would default to death-metal noise and Drano-scarred vocals, the Novellas are artful, melodic, and imaginative to the brink of intoxication, and are frequently categorized as chamber-pop. It is, however, a chamber that lies very close to a crypt. | |||
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— Mark Keating, Sound Views |
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by Linus Gelber |
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Since 1994, when the band morphed by baby steps out of a previous combo called Peter Chance and the Undergroove, The Novellas have been spinning their gravely irreverent tales of high-octane dramatic enigma to a growing mass of fans who can’t figure out where in the world these songs come from, and how on earth we’ve done without them for so long. Imagine Magazine and the Human League meeting in a particularly good vintage clothing store and you’ll scratch the dark surface of their bright and unexpected sound. Surprise:
serious perky pop tunes about Russian Novellas performances are true moveable feasts—Peter (acoustic guitar, vox) and Laura Ogar (keyboard, theremin, tape samples) approach each show as a party at which they play gracious hosts. Dressed to but never beyond the verges of sartorial excess, they radiate warmly skittish chic and happy-puppy eagerness. Tonight, with Mark Nixdorf on bass as always and “summer drummer” Jagoda on the kit, they are minus Laura’s theremin but plus both Deni Bonet on violin and spoken-word dervish Jonathan Berger on rant. Gold-rimmed round specs, serious glare, and an uncharacteristic starched white shirt make Jon look like a clean-shaven Kropotkin, perched on a barstool on stage and scribbling intently in his Poet’s Accessory throughout the set while he watches for his cues. Deni, who is featured on the band’s recent debut CD (“Magnets in Intimate Places”), darts in and out of the music, adding here a Michael Nyman-esque textural saw and there an exuberant gypsy air that dances back to the days of Scarlet Rivera’s “Desire”-era Bob Dylan accompaniments. (This is still my favorite Dylan record. So shoot me.) |
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In performance, Chance is a chameleon whirl of faces and voices. His (currently spiked blonde) leading-man hunky good looks and easy nervous energy stutter through different guises from song to song; after the set you may not quite know what he looks or sounds like out of character. He’ll be the toothy grinning jerky-limbed pulpit-puppet preacher in “Marietta’s Comin’” (gleefully roaring “Now, and at the hour of our death, Amen”) one moment, and an aging broken toreador weeping about his lost glorious past just a few seconds later. In “Self Immolation Row” he’s a clenched man at the end of his rope (“Lost my job, lost my wife, I lost my dignity / There’s only one thing I can think of doing / One thing that’s left for me down on / Self immolation row”), ready to go down in flames. “I’m a Gemini,” he explains. “I have all these personalities.” Peter’s fey delivery is varied, precise and limpidly clear, and he has a beautiful resonant voice as supple as any in the clubs today. Music critic Mark Keating, who does canny diggings in the fecund lands of New York music, suggests that a consistent element in The Novellas’ work is the presence of death as an “unspoken awareness of mortality.” I’m intrigued by this notion, but I disagree. Chance’s garden is full of secret orchids, to my mind, rather than nightshade. Is “Buried Alive” (“My love is buried alive, minutes to go, minutes to go / Locked in my box, under the ground / Under the rocks, never to be found”) about an actual live burial? Or is it about hiding tender pieces of the heart away from the madding crowd? Or both? Peter is suitably vague on the songwriting process. “Writing songs is like waiting for the bus,” he offers. “Sometimes the bus comes, and sometimes you walk home.” Perhaps a Novella’s life is like a Novellas tune: starting the thumpy “Laura’s Gone to London” at Arlene, Peter tells the crowd, “This isn’t about this Laura. It’s about another Laura.” And he sidesteps nearly off-mike and mutters, in a clear audible aside, “Yeah, right. And another Peter. In another life.” And begins to play. The Cliff Notes Version: The Novellas are one of the best unsigned bands in New York City. Their Web site is fast and informative, constantly updated, and captures an accurate skeleton essence of the band. Their CD, which does not match their live shows, is available in stores, distributed by Ripe & Ready. (The CD is very good. The live shows are in Technicolor.) |
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This article appeared on MusicDish.com. |
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parapsychics (“Nina”),
Southern hauntings (“Marietta’s Comin’”),
wounded bullfighters (“The Drunken Toreador”) and alien
abduction (“There Goes Betty Again”) turn out to be
absolutely essential. There’s not a stitch of kitsch in
what frontman Peter Chance calls his “docu-pop” songs.
“We do stories,” Peter says, a bit nonplussed by Mr.
Cyrano’s rambling questions on character development and
literary influences. “Some of them are real stories, and
some are put together from lots of different stories.” Call
yourself The Novellas and a guy’s got to wonder about authors.
So what writer would be a stylistic influence? “I don't
know,” he says. “What do you think?” Um, Hemingway?
For the economy of words and the elliptical themes? “I was
going to say that! Yes!” Cool.
Laura’s
liquid, majestic keys spread out languorously behind Peter’s
pointed guitar work in a pageant of sonic architecture that is
instantly entrancing. At most shows (but not this one) a small
metal wind chime hangs from the microphone, and at the end of
each song Peter sets it tinkling; the shifting, whispering sigh
of sound is like a compressed recap of the music that has gone
before, fading quickly and leaving a fond faint tickle in the
ear. “Here’s another happy song,” he says, plunging
into the next twisty wistful bit of existential weirdness with
an exaggerated, eye-rolling shrug—as if to say, “What
will these wacky guys come up with next?”|
What
took them so long? Since 1996, the Novellas have been threatening, promising, offering an album of their quirky, complete, literary songs to an adoring public. They’ve been suggesting for what seems like forever now that the album is just around the corner. Early live cassettes and preliminary demo tracks from the mid-90s would speak of the imminent release of Magnets in Intimate Places, and both Peter Chance and Laura Ogar, the biggest Novellas, would say they just needed a little more time in the studio to finish up. So what took them so long? From the sounds of the full-length Novellas album, finally released to an appreciative audience, they took all that time to get it right. The Novellas, based on Peter Chance’s short-stories that rhyme and Laura Ogar’s minimal keyboards, theremin and soundbytes—as well as a stylishness that could only be beat by a really big stick—have sent us twelve of their songs from their incredible repertoire. Most of the songs are pretty familiar to us, the loyal Novellas following: “Marietta's Coming,” a ghost story, “Nina,” a telekinetic’s story, “Carole Lombard,” a starlet’s story, “There Goes Betty Again,” an alien abduction story, “Laura’s Gone to London,” a flaky world traveller tale, and many other songs that aren’t about women. They’re all good. All the songs are good, but anyone who’s been to a live show would know that. The question with this release, and really, with any studio recording, is whether it lives up to the live show. With the subtle keyboard stylings behind the full-on Novellas band, and Chance’s visually psychotic performance, they’d be a tough show to improve upon. Does the album do it? Could the album do it? It tries. Magnets in Intimate Places comes close. In some places, it succeeds. Nothing could compare to seeing Chance’s angular movements and his seemingly coked-up face as he jumps into the audience and dances, not among us, but somehow above us. That event, occurring in most every show, is priceless, and non-transferable to sound. But the clear beauty of the songs, the excellent package, the lyric sheet, and the appearance of lesser-heard numbers like “Caterpillar Man” and “Graduation Day” makes up for it. Hell, simply having the opportunity to own the incredible “Self-Immolation Row” and “The Drunken Toreador,” each pulling from different Latin musical traditions, are worth the price of admission. But so many of the songs feature more than the usual five-person band, with an additional cast of ten to flesh out parts that you never even thought were missing. Oh… The album is good. This album might be the most seamless transferral of what a local band can do live to the album. There is little loss, and the pleasures heard on this vital album definitely make up for it. The album, unbelievable as it may sound, was absolutely worth the wait. |
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— Jonathan Berger, Antimatters |
This
is one of the wildest, eclectic, surreal, powerful pop rock antifolk
bands to come to the Acme Underground. We are proud to have this
kind of talent to present to the world.
