Monday, January 03, 2005

Goin' Deep Lilith with the Coy

By Douglas McDaniel
Mythville.com

Greek theater was made of great facial expressions in song, and certainly, there is an air of siren-esque theater about the Coy, a Lake Tahoe-based band of at least two, a couple, and more than likely a host of other camp musicians in Northern California.

Really, what first struck notice was a brief ope-mic appearance at a Phoenix was the expressive style of singer. And then, boy-girl Sugarcubes of it, or, what I like to call these days: Deep Lilith.

For reasons too repulsive to go into full detail here, the first wife of Adam in Hebrew folklore, in existence before the creation of Eve, was also lambasted as a sort of botched heretic wolf-gal in ancient Semite legend, an evil person who haunted deserted places and hunted down children to devore them.


Given the tendencies of nature, and women in general, for animals to protect their young, as well as the bad press Eve got later on by those same ancient Semites, I’d have to say if the world is really changing, then going deep Lilith is worth a second millenium look, since everything, in the long run, comes down to marketing.

The witchy call of the Lilith bandwidth is made up now, and increasingly more every year, by the wealth of female musicians who have arisen out of the post-punk vibe of the likes of the same women who played the touring festival of the same name. This is the generation of Aquarian counter-measures in the war of the sexes, and this generation of Lori Amos-style engenues, deeply magical waifs like Kate Bush or Bjork, or, hell, the wild women running with wolves going back to the days of Joni Mitchell, the fire calls of Ani DiFranco, P.J. Harvey or hell, Patti Smith: The “it’s not nice to fool mother nature” brands.

These are molds, yes, for the likes of the Coy. Since these women are artists, damn them, and the new generation to follow, as demonstrated in their singer, is likely to resurrect Adam’s first wife, in musical terms, given the right breaks and so on, by continuing to hone well-crafted odes to the various modes of brilliant, circuitous lyricism and dissonance.

The boy-girl duo had a bit of Mercury in retrogade night with studio tricks out of wack, strings broken, and a general relaxed, goffball mood, especially for the guitarist, who backed it up in every way he could, though, by the reading of the singer, she was fully in control of her voice and the songs themselves, honed, in this way, as they were by a long stint in Phoenix.

If there wasn’t quantity, there was quality. Look for great things from this group in the future. For more information, go to www.thecoy.com.










Can Scottsdale Arts CEO Wuestemann make the Center for the Arts hip again?

By Douglas McDaniel After his first six months as the CEO for Scottsdale Arts,  Gerd Wuestemann is revealing plans to initiate improvement...