The Lascivious Biddies, whom I recently had occasion to describe as “New York’s hippest girl group” (watch this space for details), will be throwing a CD release party at Joe’s Pub on Saturday, October 9, at 9:30. I wrote the liner notes for their new album, Get Lucky (nice title, huh?), and here’s a tantalizing snippet thereof:
I like smart music, the kind that doesn’t tell you everything it knows the first time you hear it. I like uncategorizable music that can’t be squeezed into smug little pigeonholes. I like serious music that isn’t afraid to be funny–and vice versa. If that’s what you like, too, then you’ve come to the right band, and the right album. Or, to put it another way, you just got lucky.
Start with the witty sound of the Lascivious Biddies, a knowing blend of chirpy girl-group pop and the smooth swing of a King Cole-style jazz trio (piano, guitar, bass, no drums). Lee Ann Westover’s sly, edgy lead vocals ride atop a chiming cushion of close harmony, with Deidre Rodman and Amanda Monaco weaving piano and electric guitar together so deftly that you can’t always tease them apart, and Saskia Lane laying down shapely bass lines that tie each song together like a well-wrapped Christmas package. On paper, it’s a quirky, unexpected mixture, but when you first hear it for yourself, the results sound so utterly natural that you never stop to wonder why nobody ever tried it before.
The songs–most of them by the Biddies themselves, with a couple of shrewdly chosen covers thrown in for contrast–are as unobtrusively unpredictable as the way in which they’re performed. Some, like “Famous,” take a coolly detached look at the idiosyncrasies of New York life (“I wanna be famous/Tabloids will print what I eat/I wanna be famous/Who I do will be news on the street”). Others offer wry reminders that many New Yorkers, including two of the Biddies, hail from points west, and know better than to write them off as flyover country: “I know a girl named Betty who wears patent-leather shoes/She just moved from Missouri and she’s feeling kinda bruised.” Ever and always, their collective point of view is that of four big-city women who take a tough-minded, sharply contemporary view of men: sometimes affectionate, sometimes dismissive, always disillusioned….
If any of that makes you curious, go hear them, and tell ’em I sent you.
To hear samples from Get Lucky, go here.
For more information about Joe’s Pub, go here.