New Music 2016 - Part 11 - Freakwater - Scheherazade

When an LP takes its title from a Persian queen-consort, she was also the storyteller for One Thousand and One Nights, one might conclude that things are not going to be exactly straightforward. You are right but I'll try to keep this post concise.

It is also an example of two points I feel that I often make:
The first is that trying to fit music into little 'genre-boxes' is at best a waste of time that is far better spent finding and listening to music. At worst it is misguided and distracts from the investigation of "new" music by others simply because they may perceive it to be beyond their habitual comfort-zone.
Tied in to this is the second; there is so much music available to find that keeping an open mind and setting out on a voyage simply to find whatever may be out there seems a pretty good option to me. The few useful navigation aids en route are those things the judgement of which one has learned to respect. That could be applied to a festival of which the line-up is as yet unknown when one books a ticket or, as in this case, a record label - Bloodshot Records.  This post also adheres to one of the few founding principles of this blog and it is that I don't waste my energy on writing about things that I don't like.

Scheherazade is the first new Freakwater record in over a decade.
It was released in North America 5 February 2016 and will be so in Europe 12 February 2016 on LP, CD and d/l.

The LP cover screams 1970s to me - the interlocked and curvy typeface, the colors and optical-illusory carpet of the motel room both - but that is not what it sounds like.
Not. At. All. The vocals are handled, as they always have been for this is Freakwater album #8, by Janet Bean and Caroline Irwin who both hail from Louisville, Kentucky.

This is the track list:

Freakwater - Scheherazade

• What the People Want
• The Asp and the Albatross
• Bolshevik and Bollweevil
• Down Will Come Baby
• Falls of Sleep
• Take Me With You
• Velveteen Matador
• Skinny Knee Bone
• Number One With a Bullet
• Memory Vendor
• Missionfield
• Ghost Song

I reckon that you best go figure what else, if anything, it reminds you of. I haven't decided that myself but I like the whatever-that-it-is and I that's quite good enough for me, at least for now.