Customer Reviews

Hooker

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(0)
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I love this album. There is no band like Gloria Deluxe. The song "Hospital Waiting Room Blues" is great rock and roll - it is wild and funny and sad. The singer performs as a woman who has arrived at a hospital waiting room drunk and bleeding. And she bleeds, "waiting for the alcohol to wear off," before the hassled doctor will see her. It is awesome. No one writes and performs songs about drinking like Gloria Deluxe. This is only one of many many reasons to listen to this album.

Gloria Deluxe is a rare collection of true talent. Hooker is a CD full of gems. Cynthia Hopkins' voice and genius are quirky, soothing, hilarious, and rocking. My favorites cuts are "Little Piece of Grace" and "Hospital Waiting Room Blues." Buy this CD; it will improve your day tremendously.

Ari Vena, a big fan

...then you'll love this CD. Cynthia Hopkins' tough lyrics and bluesy melodies are full of the same mix of anger, attitude, and sexual swagger that make Phair's "EXILE IN GUYVILLE" so raw and honest (and damn fun!). Plus, with HOOKER's amazing track "One-Legged Waltz," you get the sort of biting, melancholy, and tragic beauty I've not heard in a song since, well, Liz Phair on "EXILE's" "Canary." Gloria Deluxe on this album seems often to achieve a very Austin, TX-type blues sound. They need to go to Austin and play live and watch how many people fall in love with them. Just you wait....

Gloria Deluxe is a rare collection of true talent. Hooker is a CD full of gems. Cynthia Hopkins' voice and genius are quirky, soothing, hilarious, and rocking. My favorites cuts are "Little Piece of Grace" and "Hospital Waiting Room Blues." Buy this CD; it will improve your day tremendously.

Ari Vena, a big fan

Random. Symphonic. Raunchy. Sweet. If Tom Waits got Lucinda Williams knocked up in a dark cabaret, their love child might just sound like Gloria Deluxe. I listen to this cd and I want to cry... no, drink whisky... no, cry. I find myself waltzing alone and laughing. It's been too long since I found new music that took me by surprise. Buy it.

A primer for the uninitiated: roughly speaking, Gloria is Cynthia Hopkins, an award-winning singer/songwriter/composer/actress (you might call her a kinetic downtown lyric poet) and Deluxe is her band, led by guitarist brother Tom and bassist and drummer Chris Bonner. The band is named after Cynthia's accordion, on which she often accompanies her high, silvery, pitch-perfect voice and artful lyrics in concert and which makes a couple of appearances on Hooker. She writes songs about little people with big hearts, caught in the moments when time stops and their inner longings are revealed. As in the spoken intro to "In the Heat of the Desert," set in quintessentially witty, thoughtful and expansive Gloria Deluxe territory: "This is a song about a near-death experience, in the positive sense of that phrase... It's about two o'clock in the morning and it's late and it's dark and you're all alone out on the road." She's almost always singing about some kind of near-death experience that could easily be happening out on a road somewhere under the stars, the protagonist caught between a bewildered yet defiant existential rootlessness and rare glimpses of heavenly bliss, with an alcohol-soaked abyss inbetween. Yet it's all remarkably free of despair. She can sing about the musings of a drunk, and somehow, without warning, it becomes a spiritual epiphany.

Hooker is a heady mix of musical styles - wistful folk ballads, driving rock n' roll, accents of bluegrass, polka, rockabilly, even circus music - informed by an exceptionally refined theatrical sensibility that is by turns delicate, fiery, spooky and uncannily sexy. The first time I saw her on stage, she showed a rare ability to combine versatile role-playing with a secure dramatic presence: an alluring snow queen speaking with a scintillating Mae West twang, an earnest schoolgirl living on top of a wardrobe, a macabre wandering minstrel. Each of these could be a character in her songs. Yet just as it is impossible to say exactly why that performance worked, you can't quite put your finger on why Cynthia is such a distinctive and exciting songstress. In that and other ways, she is a true original, one that defies categorization.

My favorite moments on Hooker are those with minimal musical accompaniment, when Cynthia's voice is free to delve deeper into the melodies, thoughts and feelings of the characters in her songs: an injured woman in an alcoholic stupor waking up to her remorse in "Hospital Waiting Room Blues," an injured heart trying to love again in "A Long Way Down." I'm also partial to the quirky rhythms of "One Legged Waltz" and the yearning ballad "Such A Long Time." The latter is the only song to feature the accordion that has worked such wonders in her stage performances and on the Gloria Deluxe debut CD, which included the signature "Ode to Drink" and "Lord Don't Look At Me," an astonishingly simple, poignant and captivating ditty about human fickleness. Pretty soon she's going to find a way of combining the beauty of such solo work with the multi-instrumental sophistication of Hooker, and when she does, watch out. Not to say I'm in a hurry. It's a real pleasure to hear music created out of a genuine need, the need of a heart that was hurt long ago for reasons it doesn't quite understand: the heart still has enough courage to put its faith in a sweet, transcendent release, and keeps its spirits up by singing to itself about love, drink, cads, the universe and everything.

a beautiful, fantastic album. Gloria Deluxe is a very talented band that is wonderful live and in the studio. Hooker is a must have CD. Buy It.

I can not recommend Gloria Deluxe's newest album "Hooker" enough. Every time I play "Hooker", which is very often, whoever happens to be over asks, what is this incredible music? I still rarely go a day without listening to the specific tracks "Little Piece of Grace" and "A Long Way Down" at least once. "Hospital Blues" is so purely sung, and so honest and atmospheric that no matter how many times I hear it, I'm always instantly transported into the eerie but strangely warm world of the song. Gloria Deluxe is deep and wide music, which continues to surprise and satisfy you with every listening. I can't tire of the words, as they are the simple truth spoken in surprising and beautiful poetry, which gets more and more ripe with meaning as you live and learn the lessons that are woven in with and juxtaposed against rooted and bluesy, soul-reaching rhythms and saw-solos. Cynthia Hopkins is like a mix between Tom Waits, Rickie Lee Jones, Ani Difranco, Nick Drake, and Michelle Shocked, with a klezmer/blues/rock-folk-country richness that keeps you guessing. The album is simply so rich in humor, wisdom, and dope-ass, funky, good music, that I can recommend it with joy and absolute confidence to anyone who goes for that kind of thing.

Yael Teplow

trying out a new band is like a blind date. will you listen to the end of the cd? will you play it again? will it become the soundtrack to the next several months of your life? i had a great date with this cd and it lives on my cd player. i am never sorry when i hear the first track begin to play. i love the singer's voice and her lyrics are so smart and sexy and touching. i didn't know what to expect from gloria deluxe, great name, cool photo, i had hopes, they were exceeded.

This is a wonderful band. While listening to them, I kept thinking of other musicians I love who they remind me of, and then I gave up. They're their own kind of wonderful. Lilting and sweet and bitter and spooky, this band has great lyrics and accomplished musicianship. Saw, accordion, trombone, violin, trumpet, and down home dirty soul. I wouldn't trade them for the world.