Ruby Throat

KatieJane Garside has always been an enigmatic character, from the days she fronted and then abandoned 90s cabaret-goth rockers Daisy Chainsaw right up to recent years that found her engaged in performance and photograph exhibits as a scantily (and sometimes un-) clad punk waif. In her Chainsaw days Garside may have inspired later antics the likes of Britney Spears and Courtney Love with her penchant for shock visuals including head shaving, face-smeared makeup and sometimes barely coherent stage performances. This latest incarnation of the lovely but possibly disturbed Garside is just as hard to get your head around, but may finally capture the true strength of her tender demons.

Ruby Throat displays a completely different, and disarmingly seductive, view of Garside’s inner psych; namely, a slow, sparse and largely acoustic setting that emphasizes her innate and undeniable vocal talent, backed by just enough of an instrumental tapestry to keep the experience from being labeled ‘for adults only’.

At her finest Garside has the ability to carry a tune dripping with dulcet tones and a homing pigeon-like sense of musical direction that can cause healthy males (and probably some females) to look around furtively just to make sure nobody in viewing distance is casting disapproving puritanical glares their way. This woman oozes sensuality from every pore; hence the name of ‘Ruby Throat’, I suppose.

The backing instrumentation varies from barely perceptible (“John 3:16”) to a sort of spaghetti-western bluesy funk (“Dear Daniel”) to the title track that plucks out acoustic guitar chords accented with harmonic interludes and the occasional barely-controlled soprano wail.

The mood doesn’t vary all that much from track to track, but after a while that doesn’t seem to matter as Garside draws the listener in with her hypnotic crooning and chillingly personal vignettes centered on relationships, tattered lives and dilapidated soundscapes. It’s a long way from her days of power chords and self-destructive antics, but perhaps that’s the point. KatieJane and co-conspirator Chris Wittingham have created something delicate, soothing and profoundly personal with Ruby Throat’s ‘The Ventriloquist’; one can only hope Garside herself has found the kind of inner peace her words and voice project in these songs.

Highly recommended.

peace