Charming Hostess

by Punch
ReR Megacorp, Thornton Heath, Surrey UK, 2005
CD, $14US
Distributor’s website: http://www.rermegacorp.com; http://www.rerusa.com.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University, University Center MI 48710 USA

mosher@svsu.edu

With the radio success of Gwen Stefani's "Rich Man," the minor scales and biddy-biddy-bum beats of Shtetl Pop has met with newfound interest. Jewlia Eisenberg of Oakland, California mines her own Jewish background, plus other musical influences, with her band Charming Hostess. They dance over Marc Chagall’s rooftops as halvah-sweetly as the sadly missed Ofra Haza.

Charming Hostess makes good use of traditions from Eastern Europe, accessible by travel as great-grandparents' memories fade. "Ms. Lot" is a Muriel Rukeyser poem set to Bulgarian music, and "Esturtu" is a festive Sephardic girls' song from Turkey. The Hungarian and Transylvanian music of "Szerelem" is as moody as the Velvet Underground's "Black Angel's Death Song", while "Lady Gay" mixes Celtic flavor and klezmer clarinet in a way that Dublin's Leopold Bloom would approve. "Aish Ye Kdish" is a work song by Sabreen of Palestine. The singsong "Kaffe Turke" evokes an event with village men singing on one side of a muddy commons, the women on the other.

These Californians also dig in to rootsy American music, in the cheerful Zydeco "Two Boys" and a respectful cover of Lefty Frizell's "Long Black Veil". The contemporary country rock of "Heaven Sitting Down" evokes both Cheryl Crow and the early 1990s Silicon Valley favorites D’Cuckoo. Bruno Schulz's poem "Street of Tubing" is given big arena-rock gestures, as Charming Hostess shuttles it between spy movie jazz and something like Limp Bizkit at Oakland Coliseum. "Torso" hurries as fast the seduction the song lyrics recount, its horns enthusiastically helping to "urge her fast, fast out of her dress. Roxanne Meyers tale of contemporary commercialized life "The Procedure and King Cobra" is witty songwriting in the vein of the 1980s band Squeeze.

There is some indication of a reorganization of the band Charming Hostess during the midst of recording the CD, perhaps to emphasize the female vocalists (think of the acapella quartet Jezebel). The visually inclined will be disappointed with the boxing-themed booklet designed by Matthew Myers (Concept: A. Execution: C-.) accompanying the CD, for it's hard to decipher the lyrics' fine print over dense dot screens making up enlarged newspaper photos. There's an interesting narrative to "Lady Gay" but give up trying to read it on the CD booklet.