Melora Creager, the founder and creative force of the cello-driven, lyrics-centric, and long-standing indie rock band Rasputina, released her latest album, Unknown, this past April on her own record label, Filthy Bonnet Records. She wrote, composed, and recorded the album in 3 weeks in her basement studio and the result is raw and riveting – and revealing. Over the past year or so Melora has had to endure the invasion of her personal privacy and the loss of all the information she had stored on her computer and online. Someone hacked her computer, stole her identity, and corrupted her computer files – and just like that, a big part of her life was gone. We are all connected intimately to the Internet, the Cloud, and our devices, not just in a social networking sense, but as a drawing board for our ideas and a storage area for our writings, photos, videos, and other extremely personal information.
The resilient Melora has had to readjust and rebuild over a transformative year in which she responded to this violation by creating an intense and triumphant album that showcases her unbroken spirit. The songs on Unknown are alternately defiant and uplifting, but the listener needs to be attentive to Melora’s keen awareness and insight into the nightmare plight of being so attached to our devices and online identities and how easily our lives can be upended by a breach in security. So, this time, it’s personal on Unknown; less of a delving into history and storytelling and more of a direct address of her specific, but universal, situation.
Most of the songs on Unknown are sharp in many ways, from the restless turmoil of cello and other strings to Melora’s perceptive perspective and her versatile vocals. She makes the listener hang on to her every word, not only because of the words she uses and the subjects she is addressing, but because of her supple, changeable vocal control and nuanced intonation. Album leader “Curse Tablet” swims in agitated, sometimes to the point of squeaking, strings reverberation as Melora’s layered and doubled exclaimed vocals dance over her words. She sing-talks of someone who is “disturbed” and “wicked”; “a shadow made substance”, who has taken over her life. This could be taken to mean the perpetrator who stole her identity, or it could even be interpreted as the “fake persona” that some wear like a mask when going online in order to hide the real person inside…
Abrasive upright bass and shivering strings form an uneasy, noisy discord on the doom-laden “Sparrowhawk Proud” as Melora’s pinched, warbling tone rises through lines like “…set me free / Already I feel dead.” The song is possibly a metaphor for being trapped like a “nightingale” in the grip of and at the mercy of a “sparrowhawk” who has taken control. While that song is tough on the ears, the following one, “Unicorn Horn Mounted”, adds more bittersweet pulled cello to soften the blow. Melora is in allegorical storytelling mode, sing-talking against the fast-paced strings about a unicorn being hunted for her horn, declaring “What you don’t have by right / you steal.”
On “Indian Weed” Melora brings up the point that “People live with secrets all the time / You’ve got yours / I’ve got mine.”, deploring the fact that whoever infiltrated her computer, stole and corrupted all of her personal information. The instrumental “Unknown” simmers with a low-key frisson of drawn and plucked strings and windswept sound. It seems relatively calm, but is it really?... On the talky, convoluted, but interesting “Emily Dickinson’s Trophy Envelope”, Melora compares herself to the poetess, using her words and personality as a way to cope with and heal her wounds from the incorporeal violation of online crime, citing her “boundless sense of humor” about herself and others. She comes to the realization that she should not be paranoid after this traumatic event and to stop “…reading into things…”
The disquieting trio of songs, “Sensed”, “Taken Scary”, and especially “Psychopathic Logic”, specifically address and distill Melora’s experiences. The centerpiece of the album, the thought-provoking “Psychopathic Logic”, is filled with densely-packed, high-impact lyrics that focus on a psycho who can only see what’s on a screen and is blind to actual people. This person has “No empathy…for anyone… / so empty.” Melora piquantly picks at her words, intoning that the psychopath “shared his findings” and “sold his trophies” (referencing the unicorn horn mounted on a wall from a prior song, “Unicorn Horn Mounted”). This psycho exists in his own fantasy world where he believes “She doesn’t even know she’s mine”, but “In truth he’s so scared of her”. Melora goes on to state that this insidious individual is emotionally crippled and incapable of love and that love is “human to the core” and can transcend the evil in this world.