Customer Reviews

Lamprey

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

 

 

This album is not won't grab your ears as quickly as the others, but it grows on you. When I first bought the disc I didn't listen it to it much until one long road trip. I was crossing the Mackinaw Bridg, the sun was setting across the lake, and I fell in love with this music. I put the CD player in repeat mode and drove through the night.

Pop-rock with solid, otherworldly atmosphere. "Ray Ray Rain" is as good a song as we got from a rock band over the course of the last decade, and "Crutches" is even better. 2000 is a good year to take stock, go back and listen to good music you might have missed. If you start here, you'll be very pleased you did. A resourceful, original work by an important band that keeps on pushing.

On Lamprey, Bettie Serveert stretch out from the wonderful Palomine. There are some excellent pop songs like "Re Feel-It" and the great driving song "Ray Ray Rain". I love Carol's voice on it; how she can go from soft to forceful. She is a very underrated singer, perhaps because she doesn't crave the spotlight.

Still here is the heavy rock guitar "solos". This band has a lot of Neil Young influence on this record. Especially how they can rock or do acoustic ballads: "Something So Wild". This is a great album that got beat up in the press. Don't believe it, buy it!

When I first bought this album, I pretty much listened to Ray Ray Rain more than any of the other songs, as it's by far the catchiest. When that grew old, I started listening to the rest and was very pleasantly surprised. It's good music to drive to...

Lamprey is a great cd all around. The fourth track, Re-feel-it, is an especially good tune. My husband went so far as to say "I'd be happy for the rest of my life, just listening to this song over and over again."

An angelically beautiful lead singer and three somewhat dorky-looking guys as the instrumentalists -- sounds like a familiar college-band setup? Carol van Dijk's sweet vocals and eccentric lyrical sensibility may be the main assets of Bettie Serveert, but the band is no slouch, backing up her voice with garagey but catchy instrumental hooks that elevate the songs beyond just Carol and her voice.

"Ray Ray Rain", as weird as the title may sound, is a pop masterpiece. I remember learning it on guitar and playing it to friends who swear they must've heard it somewhere but have never heard of Bettie Serveert. It's another one of those "Why didn't somebody write this sooner?" pop songs, helped a great deal by the lovely, image-rich lyric: "Leaving on a pale moonlight/Staring at the tail lights of the truck that rips/The road apart in front of me/I watch your right hand shifting gear/Wondering what I'm doing here/'Cause both our minds are occupied by memories."

Lamprey's only real weakness is that, instead of going for the uptempo drive of "Ray Ray Rain", often it lapses into a slow melancholia where the band's melodic strengths still show, but the pace is slowed to a crawl. "D. Feathers" avoids the dilemma by adding some timely, thick guitars near the end of the song to provide dynamic, but many of the tracks that follow slow down the momentum considerably, and that's when van Dijk's voice starts becoming a little too demure, too quiet.

Small gripes on a very good album that frequented my playlists in the mid-'90s.

Following up one of the best albums in Dutch history is always hard. 'Palomine' in my view was the best Dutch album in the 1990's and hopes were high for Lamprey. A little too high, because Lamprey does not totally live up to their name. It is the best sounding Bettie album however and probably the best produced, unfortunately the quality of the songs is sometimes lacking.
Only Keepsake, Tell me Sad and Something So Wild can be added to the great Bettie Serveert songbook worth keeping.

Still a good buy though, some people think this is the best Bettie album

A very nice, but different, follow-up album to Palomine. Overall I like this one better, but still not as much as Dust Bunnies. Powerful, up and down melodies, Carol's voice, and the music just hit the spot for me.

This album is outstanding, from beginning to end. It is the best Bettie Serveert album. The songs take me away from wherever I happen to be. The music and lyrics are both great. Highly recommended.