Luminous

Reflecting Skin lighten up

Cellars by Starlight by Brett Milano

Reflecting Skin are the type of band that you'd love to avoid lumping into a category. They've got the emotive female singer up front, the shimmering guitar chords and the trance-inducing rhythms -- and at their Middle East release party last week, they had more than a few vampire-bitten types in the audience. So you make a note to avoid hauling out stock adjectives like ethereal, moody, or the band's least favorite, dark.

"God, I hope we're not that," said guitarist Christian Gilbert as he ducked into Hi-Fi Pizza before the release party. "I hope people don't hear darkness; I hope they hear people doing something they really want to do." Adds bassist Alex Milne, "We're dark only in that we're introspective. And some people aren't always going to want to introspect." Concludes singer Leah Chandra, "We're on the lighter side of dark."

In fact, Reflecting Skin are a good deal more interesting than that. Their CD Haley (on their own unnamed label) takes the textural soundscapes of Gilbert's earlier band Opium Den to a more abstract plane -- if it's dark, then so are a lot of seductive things. There's a bit of a Cure/Banshees undertone (specifically, the creative-peak albums that Siouxsie made when Robert Smith was a Banshee), and with a mix of world-music elements and rock backbeat, it's the sound of the Middle East meeting the Middle East. On stage the band often hide behind a movie screen, moving from cosmic suspensions into big chord crashes; meanwhile Chandra's vocals are alternately inviting and menacing. The disc doesn't catch the full range of their dynamics, but there's enough to keep you coming back.

To hear them tell it, they were fated to get together. Gilbert, Milne, and drummer Dave McFarland were previously in One of Us, but their relations with John Eye, the band's theatrically inclined singer, were apparently none too smooth. Then Gilbert met Chandra at a party. "She managed to say she was looking for a guitar player, and I asked what kind," Gilbert recalls. "She said, `Someone pretty much like you.' I asked why she sang and she said, `Because I have to.' Then I said that was the right answer, and she said, `I know.' "

For her part, Chandra had already been staking out Gilbert with an eye to luring him into a band. "I knew he was what I was looking for. I'd seen Christian play in Opium Den, and I saw something that had me intrigued from the moment I saw him." "Must have been the pants," Gilbert shoots back. Still, her pursuit paid off: he agreed at the party to give her an audition, and a few days later the band were underway.

Since Reflecting Skin started on intuition, they leave room for that in the songwriting -- hence the album's fairly equal mix of conventional songs and less structured instrumentals. "We don't feel too responsible for what happens when the four of us play together," says Chandra. "For me there's a spiritual element in it, though that may not even be evident to the other band members." Adds Gilbert, "We try to think like 20th-century composers, silly as that may seem. We like to think about what we're doing and shape it a certain way -- so that when we sound abstract it's not just moody or jammy, more like we're developing a musical idea and there's some purpose to it."

Gilbert continues, "I'll tell you why I do music: it's because time is my enemy. Every piece of music says something about time. You can listen to a bird singing and know how that relates to the big picture -- that it will lead into something else and the circle will recur. So a song is a representation of that; it gives you a glimpse of the whole arrangement. My girlfriend paints, and I'm always asking why she wants to work with tubes of paint when there are all these vivid colors out there in nature. But a painting says something about space, just as a piece of music says something about time."

Normally I'd be tempted to say something like, "And you thought it was just about catchy tunes." But of course, it doesn't always have to be.

MERRIE AMSTERBURG

Seems that if you want a breakthrough album nowadays, you've got to work it forever. Merrie Amsterburg's Season of Rain was first released on Q Division's in-house label in early 1996; the singer/songwriter earned some local acclaim and promoted the disc with a handful of regional and national tours. And now that she has a major-label deal (on the Rounder/PolyGram label Zoe), she's releasing the album again while beginning studio work on the long-overdue follow-up.

In its original form, Season of Rain was one of the finest acoustic albums to come out of Boston this decade -- a cycle of songs heavy with loss and longing, hauntingly pretty and gorgeously sung. The new version has a reshuffled sequence and two extra tracks, one of which ("Patchwork") has turned up often in Amsterburg's live shows and fits in perfectly. The other one's a mixed blessing: the Police's "Walking on the Moon," which at least works better than we Sting haters would expect. It's still a bit lighthearted for this album, but her band's arrangement has a more somber tone, losing the sprightly bass riff that defined the original. And no, she didn't record it just to make her new label happy. "We've been doing it live and people have been asking for it for a while -- there's a couple of radio tapes that people have, so we wanted to get in and do it right." Her arrangement, she reveals, is built on a Ventures lick that she picked up during a brief stint with a surf band.

It's only recently that Amsterburg's gotten around to writing songs for the next album. "It was more a matter of finally getting the time. I'm a pretty private person, so I need time to allow myself to write. There'll still be some sad songs on the new album, but we've got some lighter things, too. There's one song I play baritone guitar on that's just a good, happy love song." She hasn't changed her ways entirely, though: that song bears the ominous title "Undertow."

Since the songs on Season of Rain were written quickly during a time of personal upheaval, it's ironic that she's been performing them full-time for the past three years. "Some of the songs still get to me; I felt some of that happen at the release party last week [a Rounder event at the Lizard Lounge]. Sometimes you can be guarded enough emotionally that you're not still sucked in by the emotions that caused you to write the song. But there's still times when they catch me off guard." Amsterburg plays a public disc-release party this Saturday night (May 23) at the Lizard Lounge.

DEAD BOYS TRIB

Boston-band alumni wind up in the strangest places. Last weekend a handful of local expatriates turned up at the Gabah club on Melrose Avenue in Hollywood, performing as Moronic Reducer -- the world's best and only Dead Boys tribute band. Among the perpetrators were long-time Boston punk and current rock scribe Johnny Angel and ex-New Man/Peter Wolf drummer Brock Avery -- two guys who wouldn't have been caught dead on the same stage back in the day. Opening band for the event were Angel Rot, whose line-up included not only former White Zombie guitarist Tom Five but bassist Gyda Gash -- perhaps best known (at least to anyone who's read the punk memoir Please Kill Me) as the former girlfriend of the late Dead Boys guitarist Cheetah Chrome. Her comment on the event: "It's absolutely ridiculous, but so were the original Dead Boys themselves."

TEDESCHI IN TROUBLE

When Boston-associated blueswoman Susan Tedeschi goes on tour this summer, she'll be backed by one of the best freelance rhythm sections in the genre: drummer Chris Layton and bassist Tommy Shannon, better-known as Double Trouble -- the name came from their old boss, Stevie Ray Vaughan. The pair were part of the recently disbanded group Storyville; Tedeschi is both the first female artist and the first non-Texan they've backed. The line-up will make its debut on the David Letterman show June 15; so far Tedeschi's summer tour doesn't include a Boston date.

COMING UP

The brilliant New Orleans lowlives Royal Fingerbowl hit Johnny D's tonight (Thursday) with the New Orleans Klezmer Allstars. Meanwhile Bourbon Princes are at the Milky Way, and the Urge Overkill/Jesus Lizard spinoff L.I.M.E. play T.T. the Bear's Place . . . The Wicked Farleys celebrate a new EP release at the Middle East Friday, St. Etienne are at Axis, Sleepy LaBeef plays Johnny D's, and Seks Bomba are at the Lizard Lounge . . . Deb Pasternak plays for free at Hi-Fi Records in Jamaica Plain Saturday afternoon. That night, Built To Spill play the first of two long-awaited shows at the Middle East, gospel/blues legend Linda Hopkins is at the House of Blues, the Curtain Society are at the Linwood, and the Strangemen are at Bill's Bar. Mr. Airplane Man are at Toad, and Austin transplants Numinous Peach commemorate a pretty, ethereal CD with a release party at T.T.'s . . . Lucky 57 and the Magdalenes are at Charlie's Tap Monday; the Saturnalia String Trio are in the Middle East bakery . . . A sort-of Mekons show at the Middle East Tuesday, when the Waco Brothers (with Jon Langford) share a bill with a solo Sally Timms . . . Reggae's ageless Toots Hibbert brings his latest crop of Maytals to the House of Blues Wednesday.