A cabaret garden
You know I don’t need anything right now ‘cause I’m alright, I’m alright, I’m alright. Don’t give anything but your love. Agent Ribbons play rough guitar sounds in order to open their last album Chateau crone (Antenna Farm Records, 2010). And one feels really good too listening to them performing live thanks to their energy and nerve, always a great experience.
Agent Ribbons began as a duo formed by Natalie Gordon (voice and guitar) and Lauren Hess (drums and accordion), which was joined by Naomi Cherie (violin and cello) a year after. They are from Sacramento, USA, and since their early days attracted attention of audience and the media. Tours arrived quickly and their style grew around Natalie’s personal voice and their music with a deeply psychedelic and circus character which has connected with the European cabaret tradition really soon. Their shows are powerful and theatrical, a great feast for the senses. Their first album, On time travel and romance (2009), is a sonorous marvel woven in beautiful vocals. The second one which I could enjoy performed live, Chateau crone (2010), goes much further.
After the psychedelic I’m alright, in Grey gardens the guitar still underlines the tune along with some violin arpeggios. It’s like a walk around those grey gardens which take us to a peculiar imaginary world. Dada girlfriend gives us a precious calm, one of the best love songs I’ve ever heard thanks to a fifties sonority surrounded by a lyrical surrealism that shows us love as a field for an inexhaustible discovering.
Born to sing sad songs represents another highlight also as a declaration of principles. Musically it’s a really simple song but performed live gains strength thanks to its theatrical lyrics. Natalie’s voice sounds really charm and take us by the hand in a grey world but with a rainbow in sight. A more personal song is the masturbation chant called Your hands, my hands in which they play pleasantly with each other and the other with the rest ones and vice versa or the opposite but never against it. Playful violins and voices and a distorted guitar that invite us to the sex game as a way to explore ourselves and the others, the passion seed, the motor of life.
Wallpaper is a delight in an epic tone. Its sound is more dramatic but it never forgets there’s always light beyond and inside us. It’s one of my favourites from a band I guess will always surprise us because every performance is a new creation itself. They sing You’ll never know and my mind flies to an unknown world, a castle in the sky but with feet on the passion’s ground, the only possible vital reality.
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Photo 1 courtesy of Antenna Farm Records
Photo 2 courtesy of Festival de Cine de Gijón
Photo 2 courtesy of Festival de Cine de Gijón