Carla Ulbrich LiveArtist: Carla UlbrichGenre: Folk Publisher: Luna Star Cafe, Miami, Florida Released: 2004 |
A Review by Kim Lumpkin
02/24/2004
I admit my exposure to folk music is pretty limited to childhood memories of the gentle harmonies of Peter, Paul, and Mary and, much later, the bitter protest tunes of Phil Ochs. Carla Ulbrich's brand of folk is of yet a different type; she uses it as a vehicle to air her frustrations with bad relationships, the unfairness of the songwriting business, and revealing too much over a late night phone conversation while doped up on cold medicine. If that sounds like something you'd hear on the Dr. Demento show, you're right, she's definitely at home there, but her considerable musical ability and lyrical cleverness earn her a place alongside “straight” folk acts, and her snappy, somewhat cynical style is a nice alternative to the sincerity so lovingly poked fun at in A Mighty Wind.
What immediately impressed me about Carla's performance was her strong, clear voice, girlish but not too delicate, which made nearly every word very easy to follow. This is especially appreciated in songs in which the lyrics are delivered in rapid succession, such as in “Therapy Works,” in which she rattles off a list of the ways she's “changed” thanks to her imaginary therapy sessions (since as she said, she's never in one place long enough to see a real therapist on a regular basis and can only fantasize about having one), complete with a literary reference that made my English teacher's ears perk up:
"And I no longer constantly exaggerate every single thing all of the time/And I have ceased endless rambling in run-on sentences that make no sense and that no one seems to care about except maybe me and even that is sometimes questionable and I watch as people's eyes glaze over as if they had been up for 3 days straight studying for an exam or maybe driving all night because they forgot to reserve a hotel room and they were in Florida and they were afraid to pull over and take a nap because they had just read Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find.'"Most of Carla's material has to do with the difficulty of getting over a failed relationship, either because the guy is too perfect (“Please Do Something Stupid”), too habit-forming (“It Reminds Me of You”) or if the possibility of winning over a rival is just too tempting (“What if Your Girlfriend Was Gone?”). Although nearly every song is clearly written from a woman's perspective, it isn't to such an extreme that a guy in similar circumstances couldn't relate to it, and she tempers any inclination toward male bashing with a healthy dose of self-depreciation. And therein lies Carla's charm: just under the caustic zingers that pepper her lyrics is genuine warmth and even a sense of optimism in spite of everything, delivered with some skillful guitar strumming at a toe-tapping pace. Maybe she's not such an anomaly in the folk world after all.
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