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Bliss Blood and Al Street

Bliss Blood is a musician and songwriter from Houston, Texas. She moved to New York City, New York in 1996. She sings and plays ukulele in a duo with guitarist Al Street. They have released 2 cds and are currently recording their third. She also leads the 1920s jazz-themed New York City group The Moonlighters, formed in 1998. The Moonlighters have released five cds, and toured Germany four times. She has recorded six albums from 1988-1995 with Houston experimental rock band Pain Teens. She has also appeared on recordings with groups including The Melvins, Exit-13 and Angels of Light.

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Bliss Blood and Al Street’s "Evanescent": One of the Year’s Best Albums

http://lucidculture.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/bliss/

It’s always cool when a great artist decides to give away free tracks. When those tracks are among that artist’s best ever, it’s time to get busy downloading. Bliss Blood – New York’s reigning goddess of retro – decided to put the debut album "Evanescent" by her new duo project with guitarist Al Street, up at Reverbnation as a free download. Her Hawaiian swing crew the Moonlighters may be iconic among NYC artists, but they’re only her best-known group: in the last ten years, she’s also sung straight-up swing jazz, creepy cinematic noir songs, and barrelhouse blues (and S&M punk rock, if you count her teenage band the Pain Teens from the early 90s). But this flamenco-tinged unit with just ukulele, acoustic guitar, Blood’s lush, velvet vocals and a ton of reverb that amps up the lurid factor, may be her best yet. The joke here is that this music is actually the furthest thing from evanescent – it lingers and haunts. Blood has never sung better – the Moonlighters’ harmonies range from sensual to chirpy, but here Blood runs deep and dark with an unexpected gravitas and also a sultry allure that beats anything the Moonlighters have done – and they’re a great band.

Bliss Blood and Al Street’s "Evanescent": One of the Year’s Best Albums

http://lucidculture.wordpress.com/2011/04/12/bliss/

The first track, Swallow the Dice, sets the stage, low-lit in red: it’s a menacing flamenco waltz, a defiantly metaphorical tribute to beating the system. Likewise, the steadily pulsing Liplock mines a series of double entendres, some of them ironic: play your cards too close to the vest and risk losing everything. Bulletproof is absolutely gorgeous, seductively bittersweet, all too aware of how invulnerability can be a double-edged sword:

Impervious to pain

I dream undaunted

Until I’m wanted and flaunted again

a bad bargain, maybe

I made it, unflinching

I keep it, bewitching

And blindly I see

It’s a barrier around me

Makes me bulletproof

Nothing can touch me

No one but you

The strongest track, lyrically at least, is Blackwater, a blistering broadside originally done by Blood’s “crime jazz” band Nightcall during the waning days of the Bush regime when mercenaries in Iraq were slaughering civilians left and right. Here it’s reinvented with a sarcastic rockabilly shuffle rhythm as Blood rails against the conscience-less cynicism of the soldiers of fortune who think nothing of “blood spilled on the sand.” The sultriest track is The Palace of the Wind, its Dr. Zhivago ambience lush and pensive over Street’s agile broken chords. With just ukulele, bells and vocals for most of it, Butterfly Collector wouldn’t be out of place in an early 60s Henry Mancini soundtrack. There’s also the torch-y, Freudian Legend of a Crime; the brisk, galloping Ella Es el Matador, the give-and-take of a hookup explained as a bullfight; the echoey, pillowy, sad guitar-and-vocalese instrumental Firefly, and the sly, reggae-tinged come-on Your Mayhem.

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