Customer Reviews

Gentle Creatures

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is still one of my very favorite CD's with female acoustics. A sort of country-ish nostalgia with a bit more real essence of grime and dirt, in a dry, barren, land of heart break and turmoil with some brighter looks outward ahead to better pastures of love and loneliness. I get shivers down my spine and goose bumps listening to her voice. Funny thing is; I have never been to keen on main stream country music ( albeit from some as Alison Cross, Lucinda Williams and others that have a little more substance ), but this recording is quite in a class of its own. I cannot think of anyone else that comes close to their music. Even the harden " I Hate Country Music" person, has a spot for it. Everytime I have played this for someone, they always want to know who it is and get it. Paula Frazer' voice moves me unlike many others. It is unfortunate that she and Tarnation are not more available [exposed vs exploited] to the publics listening tastes. I have heard comments that her voice is reminiscent of Patsy Cline- and that is giving her tremendous praise- because her vocals make me tear up with emotions. She swoons and pines like no other.
Some of the tracks recordings are a little bright and brittle in the upper frequencies, due to the mic and recording levels, ( I think they used an old fashion mic, one of those huge metal types of bygone days ), but tracks 2,3,5,6,9,11,14,15 are the most gratifying to me. ( I have an early CD w/o the extra tracks listed here that I purchased when it was first released). This CD is also one of my audiophilia favorites for listening to high-end audio auditions to hear what is going on;whether it is satisfying or not. The recording on most songs (mentioned) have incredible detail, imaging, focus and plenty of ambiance when they recorded this. The vocals are breathtaking and the instrumentation is clear and vivid. Buy it and enjoy.
"Mirador", their other release, is also an excellent recording with more of a zesty, hot flavored guitar and drum rythym, basking on the road in the hot desert sun-a sort of spanish/mexican zeal to it. Sometimes the songs sound like they are out of some early Italian Western film with an upbeat grunge about the music. I just want more from them. I have not listened to Paula Frazer's "Indoor Universe", but that is in the cart and ready to purchase, along with another copy of Gentle Creatures to get the extra tracks. Enjoy the Music

i never thought that i would like any music that could be classified as "country" after hearing paula's work on the czars album, "before, but longer" i decided i should find out more about her. i popped in the cd late at night after a rough day and i was amazed. so amazed that i couldn't stop listening to the cd. so amazed that i went out and got mirador the next day (mirador is a more cohesive sounding album and gets 5 stars, but gentle creatures only gets 4, partly because paula doesn't sing on every track and i don't like the tracks where she doesn't sing) my favorites are the game of broken hearts, halfway to madness, the big o motel, two wrongs won't make things right, and the track that has the lyrics about the skeleton without the shadow (i don't remember what its name is) paula has an other-worldly voice, people have described it as a cross between liz fraser and patsy cline, but she has a style uniquely her own. don't be put off by the "country" classification of tarnation. if you like this album, buy mirador, which is the stronger album (amazon doesn't have it listed)

Well if Hank Williams was a woman his music would have been a little something like this.

Tarnation is kind of...atmospheric. And haunting. Not ghoulishly, but in a good manner. The kind of haunt that stays with you through a tough day at work. Willowy, subtle and smoothe also come to my mind, and I must say, this is highly recomended. You oughta get it because then you can like it too.

I've always loved this album, but on this release find the bonus tracks problematic. They are great fun, for instance, "They Took You Away Once Again." Lyrics like: "I got used to sleeping without a gun to my head / and not being locked up in chains / I let all the people in our basement go free / and I've given all your knives to the Salvation Army" made me laugh out loud. Then there's the rather icky incest song "The Ring" (icky even by incest song standards, though the only other that comes to mind is Buffy St. Marie's eponymous one.) So how seriously are we meant to take any of this? Not too, I'd guess, but it does throw up a distracting dissonance, rather like the Keystone Kops crashing a Merchant Ivory film. Still, an all-time favorite.

There's a certain sameness to the songs in that slow,smokey,melancholy way, but the emotion in Paula Frazier's voice gives the material a very authentic feel. And if you're kicking back with your baby on a Saturday night, you'll never find a better slow-dance song than "Two Wrongs Won't Make Things Right".

I first heard Tarnation's 1995 album GENTLE CREATURES when I was a passionate fan of the 4AD and ready to buy anything that record label released. And I'm truly grateful to that label, since I otherwise may have never heard this remarkable effort. GENTTLE CREATURES, the band's first major release, features songs in an early country music vein (termed "Southern Gothic" by some) with bleak lyrics of tragic love and despair sung by Paula Frazer. I grew up surrounded only by latter-day country music, the glitzy commercial sound pioneered by Nashville, which is generally so trite and vapid, but the purity of Tarnation's music shows that the country genre can have great power.

Several of the tracks here were recorded at the home studio of Warren Defever of His Name Is Alive fame, and the album does benefit from Defever's touch, as the low-fi filtering of songs like "Big O Motel" or the surf-rock production of "The Hand" (remarkably similar to Defever's own STARS ON E.S.P. album) make them all the more hard-hitting. (Defever's bizarre recording regiment, which reportedly including having everyone sleep in bunks, led to such great stress that this lineup broke up right after the sessions.) The instrumental track "Gentle Creatures" is startling in the context of the album, for its repetitive line and ambient vocals take the sound far behind any mid-century Southern lament. And indeed, this album might not be as successful were there not clear links to the 1990s indie scene -- this is not any kind of slavish revival of Patsy Cline, but an integration of country's possibilities with the music of today.

I've loved this album over the years, and the bulk of the album moves me the same way as my first exposure to it over a decade ago. However, I can't award it an unqualified recommendation. The couple of songs not written by Paula Frazer are so much weaker than the rest, and I've never felt compelled to go on to Tarnation's second album MIRADOR or Paula Frazer's solo work which suggests the highs here aren't as high as one might think. Still, GENTLE CREATURES is generally a lovely reverie, and I continue to pull it down from the shelves quite often.

I love this album. I was lucky enough to discover it purely by chance when it first came out, and from the first 10 seconds of the track #1 I was hooked. Beautiful, evocative, haunting, and more so than any other album I've ever owned, it instantly creates a sense of time and place in my mind every time I hear it. A time before I was born and a place somewhere in the American Southwest I've never been, but I'd like nothing more than to stumble across it someday.

Porque 5 estrellas en mi calificacion?.es un hermoso trabajo con una variedad de estilos ,siempre relacionados con:un mix de country con sonidos etereos y atmosfericos.como referentes:Patsy Cline con Cocteau Twins?:wooW! .Una extraordinaria voz femenina y una buenisima banda.El cd tiene temas de distintos fuentes(trabajos anteriores);tal vez ,halla algunos temas dipares en el cd en cuanto a la calidad, pero el resultado de los 15 temas ,es un disco Indispensable.y mas si gustas de sirenas que arrullen en tu alma con una banda perfecta haciendote de mar!

I couldn't believe the similarity between the voices of Paula Frazer and Patsy Cline -- it's startling, really. But once you sit with this album for awhile you realize that the voice is the only likeness -- the capricious, sly, melancholy songs reveal a singer/songwriter bearing her bones and her heart unlike Patsy's slick, radio-friendly pouts. Distilled through classic country-western hooks, Frazer pours out all the milk from her glass and we're left wondering, in the end, just how she's going to get all her calcium. But the last song, "Rancho Carne Humana", tells us that she's not all sap and introspection: she's got a great since of humor, too.

Go ahead. Adopt this album today. Regret certainly won't follow.

This CD is so wonderfull, please just listen to it