The Cryingness of Your Crying When You Cry by Terese Taylor

Johnson, who says he's from Massatucky (Colrain, MA) is musically fueled by his pleasant memories of his father shooting things with BB guns, and the unsinkable influence of his Harley For Jesus kind of mother.

Hailing from Buffalo, NY, where Genessee Cream Ale flows from every spigot, Taylor's melancholic stories of doom, gloom, old familiar rage and hope were come by honestly. She's a back-porch storyteller that cleverly leaves colossal gaps open to interpretation - as in one of her most lyrically jarring and talked about songs, "Goats for Daddy":

"Billy mountain goat/Red ribbon 'round his neck/A present for my dad/ I carry him on my back/I follow it the best/Because I'm the best he's ever had."

The album is a lyrically potent mesh of anomalous

feedback molded with thick, syncopated drumbeats, which are particularly evident in "Reluctantly", and "Your Hand" - a song Taylor wrote about a stalker who lived below her in New Mexico, but it somehow was twisted into the closest she says she's ever gotten to a love song. Her broad vocal range is eerily addictive and adaptive as she effortlessly switches gears from low and perfectly offbeat in "Sweet" to complete falsetto in one of the records best, "Ghost", which oozes a mood comparable to sitting in a dingy restaurant with roof funk dripping down onto a breakfast you didn't want in the first place.

With the exception of "Candy" (a self-proclaimed "fuck you to radio ready pop nuggets"), all the songs are seemingly the resultant strain and chafing of the wax plug that safeguards the contents of brilliant paper skull.

FIRST REVIEW of this CD "The Cryingness of Your Crying When You Cry":

"I listened to your CD as soon as I had a 1 AM opportunity -- when it's quiet and there are nointerruptions -- and was totally captivated by your songwriting. There are some particularly beautiful simple melodies which are completely unpredictable, kind of breathtaking actually and surprising--definitely **inspired**! Some moments are positively just beautiful! Beauty is its own justification for being, right?! I really like the spare, minimalist lyrics -- as well as the high lonesome sound modern folk music 'arrangements' (very good arrangements, i might add) -- which can evoke vast vistas of alienated American landscape, as though written by a weary, much-too-long-on-the-road hitchhiker. Those first 4 songs evoke a David Lynch movie emotionality, "Goats for Daddy," "Sweet," "Reluctantly." "Ghost" is possibly the most haunting; whenever I hear something I couldn't possibly have dreamed up in a thousand years of trying, I think, "Wow, this person must be a genius! **HOW** could they have ever come up with that?" The songs on your CD sound "authentic"--that is, to my ear very original and more importantly, tapping down into a deep reservoir of pain and uncertainty and fractured memories. The songs are beautiful (there's that word again) **transfigurations**-- they take a lifetime of contradictory experience and what remains are crystal-pure distillations...poetry, in which a few words evoke so much feeling. Great music! Really, it can't get much better than that! ...the title of your CD is very funny, in a very dark way -- it made me laugh out loud, with its hyperbolic absurdity, in the same way that death itself is hyperbolically absurd --" -V.Vale, June, 2003, RE/Search magazine & Search & Destroy Zine (http://www.researchpubs.org)

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