Pregnant pauses

Ramona Silver returns to rock

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

When you consider the number of songwriters who've had babies, it's surprising that pregnancy is still one of the few largely untapped subjects in pop music -- and no, Paul Anka's "You're Having My Baby" doesn't count. One obvious reason is that pregnancy doesn't lend itself to rocking out. Still, Kristin Hersh, Kim Gordon, and Tina Weymouth all made albums while in a family way. And when Liz Phair's new Matador CD comes out this summer, she'll be in the same boat. But with a few scattered exceptions, like Throwing Muses' "Rabbits Dying" and Phair's "Whip-Smart," nobody's written much about the various altered states a woman experiences while preparing to give birth.

It's tempting to see local rocker Ramona Silver's second album in those terms, especially since she's titled it Ultrasound (out this week on Fingerprint), and she scatters motherhood references among the often impressionistic lyrics. She did indeed take a pregnant pause from performing over the past year, largely forgoing gigs until her second son, Oliver Hazel, was born, three and a half months ago. The pregnancy caused her to put temporary brakes on a career that was looking promising -- she was the runner-up in last year's Rumble and was just starting to get national press. And apparently it led her to rethink her musical direction as well. The music on Ultrasound takes a giant step away from the loud guitar/angry vocals/punk-pop sound she'd previously favored, and into a more abstract realm.

In places the new disc is a total departure from the pop of her debut, You & Me & Hell. There are two instrumentals; there's also a lot of playing around with sound. She's become infatuated with a roller-rink organ she recently got: it appears on most of the tracks, along with cornets, glockenspiel, and various percussion instruments. The result will likely confuse some old fans, but to these ears it's a step forward. In her louder days Silver had the sound, the attitude, and the passion of the best alternative pop, but she had yet to write a song that stood out from the rest. Ultrasound has at least two numbers on that level -- "Mary's Beat-Up Truck" and the acoustic "Honeydew" -- and a lot of grabbing diversions. Using her regular band (guitarist Danny Horrid, bassist Wil Marth, drummer Jim Weston) for the sessions kept Silver from becoming too self-indulgent: even the odder tracks maintain a sense for songcraft. And the keyboards and conversational vocals won't discourage the Liz Phair comparisons she's gotten in the past.

Not everything works: "Star, Star," which builds around a rhyme improvised by her older son, Free, is just too precious (or maybe I was simply disappointed that it turned out not to be the Rolling Stones tune of that name). But the album holds together as a picture of Silver's emotional state at the time it was recorded, and the more abstract compositions are fun to explore -- "Closet," a quilt of rhythm loops, recitations, and ambient sound, may be the most striking thing here.

"When you're pregnant, you don't have control over anything," Silver explains over iced tea at Cambridge's 1369 Coffeehouse. "Your body's going beyond your control, and that affected my writing. A lot of it has to do with how you feel physically. I didn't feel up to planning things out, so I had to rely on the spirit. I was in that altered state a lot. . . . And after two years of playing every night of the week, the spirit was dragging me in this other direction. Instead of complete songs, I came in this time with bits of songs that I wanted to develop. There was never a time when I said, `Okay, this is where I'm going.' "

The new sound also harks back to her musical roots. Before going solo, Silver played keyboards and sang in other people's bands. "I have a couple of synthesizers, but for a long time I had a bad attitude about keyboards, so I didn't use them. Getting the roller-rink organ made a big difference. It was appealing on a lot of levels, in part because it brought back a sound from my youth. I wound up with a bunch of little instrumentals, and when I presented the new songs to the band, I stuck a few of those on the end of the tape as jokes. Of course we wound up using them."

Although Silver isn't sure how fans will take to the new approach, it's pretty much the sound she was after. "It's not conscious, but you can't stay in the same style forever. I wanted the sounds to tell the stories as much as the words do. Some of it came off the moment in the studio, rather than rehearsing it to death. And some of my favorites are songs like `Closet' that we can't play live because they're such monsters."

Accordingly she's added keyboard player Margot Lynch to her live band, and she'll be playing less guitar on stage, though she'll still play some of the older material. Right now she's preparing for a national tour and getting her career fired up again.

"Sure, I felt a little pressure when I took a break -- you want to keep the ball rolling. But then again, the music starts from within, and sometimes Mother Nature can be the biggest boss."

GIRL ON TOP

I thought I had Girl on Top pegged as a pretty good old-school punk band with a charismatic lead singer. But their debut LP, Sue Is Sane (STR), reveals a diversity I hadn't caught before. The sound is raw and guitar-driven throughout, but of the disc's first five songs, two are sinister midtempo numbers, one's fractured rockabilly, one's an equally fractured Phil Spector girl-group thing, and the fifth ("Who Will It Be") is built on an odd combination of a trip-hop rhythm and a guitar riff out of Henry Mancini's "Peter Gunn" theme. The straight-out punk stuff doesn't appear until the disc's second half, and even then there's metal in the mix. Although the songs are catchy and Karen DiBiasse's voice has strong pop appeal, there's a neurotic edge to much of this material, as is reflected in the cover photo, a truly grisly double exposure of DiBiasse's mouth with two objects in it, a nickel battery and a huge cockroach.

Reached at her home, DiBiasse confirms that at least the roach wasn't real. "It's based on the title song, which is about anybody who's feeling good because they're taking their medication. The battery is the medicine going in and the roach is the illness going out. The photo of me in the straitjacket was the same idea -- the problem was that we couldn't get a real straitjacket. So I had to wrap a white shirt around my arms."

Also on the dark side is "Heaven's on the Way," an ambiguous heroin song written for the Boston rock figure Lou Miami, who overdosed last year (Girl on Top co-guitarist Jack Rootoo was Miami's longtime musical partner). "It's not meant to be a pro- or anti-heroin song," DiBiasse explains, "just about how heroin is heaven for people who take it."

The CD was financed by a national contest Girl on Top won two years ago in Modern Drummer magazine. "They didn't tell us how many tapes we were up against, but they said they got them from 300 cities, as far away as Iceland. I guess it was open to everyone willing to pay 10 bucks."

The origins of the band's suggestive name aren't quite what you'd expect. They just figured that any name that raised eyebrows was worth sticking with. "We'd been trying to think of a name for years. Then we were mixing a tape and putting on backing vocals: we had a male voice and a female voice. I looked at [guitarist] David [Simmons] and said, 'Let's call the band Girl on Top.' We both looked at each other and I said, 'No way, forget it.' But so many people were floored by it that we had to keep it." Their next local gig is next Thursday, June 11, at O'Brien's.

BIM ALBUM

Releasing an album of rarities and B-sides is a luxury usually reserved for veteran superstar bands. And in ska circles, Boston's Bim Skala Bim are exactly that. So it makes sense that the long-running band's latest disc, The One That Got Away (Beatville), is a career-spanning set of rare tracks. About half are outtakes from the 1992 album Bones, when they were veering away from a straightforward ska sound. Apparently they chose to leave the straight ska stuff in the can; yet two of these tunes, "Line to You" and "Murky Water" (a gung-ho song about infidelity), are as strong as any of the band's other work in that area.

The disc's main attraction, however, is that it shows some less familiar sides of Bim. There's a pair of spacy dub mixes by the English producer Mad Professor, and a surprisingly faithful cover of X's "In This House That I Call Home" (from an X tribute album that never materialized), with Vince Nobile's trombone playing Billy Zoom's original guitar lick. Another surprise cover, the Beatles' "Rain," features original lead singer Jackie Starr. It would have been good to hear some live material from that incarnation. Which brings us to the main complaint, the album's short (40 minutes) running time. After 15 years Bim must have enough in the vaults for a more comprehensive set. (The band will be playing Saturday at the Middle East -- see "Coming Up.")

QUICKIES

Locally based balladeer Martin Sexton has signed to Atlantic. His debut for the label, due in the fall, will be produced by longtime James Taylor/Neil Young compadre Danny "Kootch" Kortchmar. Also, a tip of the hat to Ric Ocasek, whose wife, Paulina Porizkova, gave birth to the couple's second child last weekend. Oliver Orion Ocasek was born shortly after midnight Saturday at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Birthing Center in Manhattan. And, in what gives a new meaning to the term "money shot," adult film director Gregory Dark has been recruited to make the next video by Boston bluebloods the Upper Crust. According to an AP report, the band will help inmates take over an insane asylum in a video for the song "Rabble Rouser," which will use the same hospital location that appeared in the multi-Oscar winner One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest.

COMING UP

Georgia's answer to the Lyres, the Woggles play T.T.'s tonight (Thursday) along with New Jersey's answer to the Runaways, the Friggs. Also tonight, Opium Den play a reunion show downstairs at the Middle East, Sublingual Records holds a CD-release party upstairs with the Binary System and Saturnalia, Spinanes leader Rebecca Gates plays the Middle East Bakery, zydeco king Boozoo Chavis is at Johnny D's, former Spin Doctor Christopher Barron goes solo at the Kendall Café, and Kinks guitarist Dave Davies is at the Sit 'n Bull Pub in Maynard . . . Tomorrow (Friday), it's Say Hi to Lisa and January at Bill's Bar, Down Low Connection at the Phoenix Landing, Talking to Animals at T.T.'s, and Barrence Whitfield at Johnny D's . . . Saturday brings Bim Skala Bim and the Racketeers to the Middle East, the Din Petals and Pee Shy to T.T.'s, Groovasaurus to the Lizard Lounge, and the Speed Devils to Bill's . . . On Sunday, Hot Tuna guitarist Jorma Kaukonen is at the House of Blues, reggae vets the Itals are at the Middle East, and the Panini Bakery in Somerville has an acoustic show with Chris Colbourn (Buffalo Tom), Ad Frank (PermaFrost), and the Red Telephone . . . And on Monday the great Texas guitarist Jimmie Vaughan plays the Roxy.