How We Quit the Forest (Rasputina, 1998)

I've been on a bit of a cello rock jag lately, with ELO's debut No Answer as the soundtrack to my drive home yesterday (the Randomness only controls one album per day - I determine the rest of the day's music). Although ELO abandoned its strict cello-sawing ways after that album (regrettably though it probably wasn't realistic to maintain that trajectory), they inadvertently inspired a later generation to pick up the instrument and make it the centerpiece. Cello has colored an array of music from the light brushes on the Moody Blues' excellent "Legend of a Mind" (a.k.a. "Timothy Leary's Dead") to the mournful flourishes on Nirvana's "Something in the Way", but aside from numbers like "Time Seller" by the Spencer Davis Group and The Beatles' "Eleanor Rigby" it doesn't often get to be the main attraction.

Two bands in particular rode the cello rock wave of the 1990's. One was Apocalyptica, a Finnish "cello metal" band notorious for a debut album of all Metallica covers. Another was Rasputina, which took a completely different approach. The band catapulted to infamy through the only consistent member Melora Creager playing cello for Nirvana in their last tour as well as a set of remixes done by Marilyn Manson just prior to this album. The band features Creager and an ever-rotating and no-longer-exclusively-female two supporting chairs, all playing cello, sometimes clean, sometimes wildly distorted. Drum services are provided by a non-member (in this case the producer Chris Vrenna) just to make things lope along better. Generally the songs stand on their own, though there are a few weird filler songs along the way.

Rasputina helped me get through a particularly angst-ridden chapter of my life at the end of the 1990's. This was one of the few albums I first heard at the college radio station, but bought my own copy later rather than fish for a promotional copy (which didn't happen). The mix of aggressive and sad tracks are just the right prescription for a depressed person. A few years later I did go the promotional route with Rasputina when I found much later album Frustration Plantation in the freebie bin at the bookstore, an album that is remarkably different in both personnel and sound from this one. Later albums, which I have not heard, were released on an independent label, and though they are still around, the heyday of the band is now well behind us.