(PR) Portland, Oregon's Rachel Taylor Brown will celebrate the release of her latest full-length, "Half Hours with the Lower Creatures," (Cutthroat Pop Records) on May 6, 2008."Half Hours with the Lower Creatures," recorded with Portland audio guru and Jackpot! Studio mainstay, Jeff Stuart Saltzman (Stephen Malkmus, Menomena, Sleater-Kinney), is a piano-based creep-pop album. Though hard to describe, names that come up are Rufus Wainwright, P.J. Harvey, Kate Bush, and "Frankenixon (Sword of Exactly) conjoined with Charles Ives and Benjamin Britten." Rachel Taylor Brown's complex, polyphonic arrangements also conjure comparisons to Elliott Smith, Sufjan Stevens, Jeff Lynne, Laura Nyro and The Beatles/George Martin, and smart/poignant lyrics bring to mind Randy Newman.
The title of Brown's new album, "Half Hours With the Lower Creatures," comes from a 1918 marine biology textbook she picked up at one of her favorite bookstores. The title and its implicit declaration of species superiority was the perfect umbrella for a collection of songs about the centuries-old, tragic-comedy of human desire to be king, and to rule over something, anything.
Expanding on the vision and scope of 2006's "Ormolu," BrownΉs third full-length and first to really capture what she heard in her head, Brown's latest originates with her curiosity. Call it a fascination with people watching or just plain interest in understanding what makes not only herself, but also her fellow man, tick. This is music cloaked in intelligent lyrics, dissonant forwardness, and out-of-nowhere pop sensibilities.
"I'm curious about motivation," she discusses openly, "and why people do the things they do - partly due to my own personal history and pathology. I think my songs tend to reflect a preoccupation with injustice and the underdog, but (I hope) with some humor, too. The songs on this album - as they kind of shuffled together out of my neurotic mind - led naturally toward thinking about war and that human desire for control. But I think what I'm really talking about here is human nature and hierarchy."
