Democracy by Stephanie Rearick

Reviews:

"You hear intimate confessions that balance winsome and anguished singing in an ongoing dialogue with her keyboard, which alternates rock 'n' roll drive, boogie-woogie bounce and a dark severity that recalls classical etudes and the brooding fire of avant-garde jazz master Cecil Taylor...

Rearick's balance of "happy accidents" and deliberate form shows artistic maturity, even as she grows increasingly expressive. She has shorn some precious techno-baroque effects and cranked up emotional resonance...

Her protective weapon is music, loaded with creative energy, vision and hope." - Capital Times

"Like Elliott Smith, Rearick can take piano chords and turn them into a dream. Her mastery of the keyboard isn't just technical, it's emotional...

She conjures otherworldly feelings right from the start of Democracy. The opening track, "Flyboy," is pure childhood innocence, wrapped in the whirling excitement of carnival music. From there the album gets edgy and nervous, referencing the macho arrogance of the president: "And if you had a market for a category hurricane, you'd rev up the motorcade and show 'em what you've got...

Democracy is good enough to stand in the company of the best independent music being made right now. By all measures, it deserves to find its way to Pitchfork and to Seattle's tastemaking KEXP radio." -Isthmus

Stephanie Rearick is slowly, carefully tweaking her recorded personality as a solo pianist and singer/songwriter who makes use of a variety of sometimes daring enhancements. Star Belly, her 2005 set of songs, seems not remarkably different then previous sets such as The Bucket Rider. Her vocal overdubbing and harmonizing are marvelous, bringing forth a multitude of possibilities as organically as a fistful of hollyhock seeds. The piano continues as a stronger and stronger element, left-hand parts tromping out a framework that a weaker player would have to wheedle out of a rhythm section. Both piano and vocal come in and out of a production treatment in which aspects move from large, sometimes obscuring amounts of processing to the purest of simplicity. When this takes place during the course of a single song, it is as if the listener has fallen asleep in an antique auction and woken up alone, back in his own bedroom. Several pieces such as "Twilight Fog" have memorable melodic lines, allowed an amazing breadth through the subtlest of production, the performer confident enough to practically ignore her own strengths. Rearick also presents interesting cover versions of pieces by Tom Waits, Brian Eno, and David Bowie. - Eugene Chadbourne at itunes

For Madison's Stephanie Rearick, labels like 'classical' and 'arty' don't do justice to the genre-bending music box of sound that comes from her upright piano. It's by turns adventurous and accessible, ancient and futuristic, comforting and scary. On her 2005 album Star Belly, sounds from an old west barroom mingle with high concept cabaret and psychedelic distortion. -- The Onion

Imagine Tom Waits reincarnated as Debussy, playing Joni Mitchell versions of Edgar Allen Poe poems on a 1920s era piano, and you get an approximate sense of the influences singer/pianist Stephanie Rearick channels on the way to making her very unique, idiosyncratic art pop.

-- Berkshire Eagle

From soothing instrumentals to ethereal pop to dark ditties to witty excursions, Rearick delivers a cornucopia of aural moods, all via her upright piano and occasionally her trumpet. -- Goldmine

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