Originally
published in Skyscraper
Elena is pretty enjoyable
and, OK, honestly, sometimes really creepy and downright disturbing.
After opening with a headmaster exhorting all the boys and girls
to avoid “inappropriate interaction,“ a female vocalist
launches into “Father’s Treasure,” a sweet lil’
ditty about incest sung against a giddy calliope of sound. Elena
is a concept album of sorts, thick with deadly ballads by Chicago
couple Tim Kelley and Christa Meyer. Kelley handles guitars while
Meyer attacks both drums and vocals, stumbling in and out of English
and German and, on “Pretty Girls,” even wandering
into some sort of vo-coder Madonna territory. Most often, Puerto
Muerto just sound like they’ve been doing serious time with
Kurt Weil, but they weave an eclectic array of instruments into
their peculiar brand of folk cabaret. On “Licht,”
for example, they craft what’s essentially a folkie tune
with crunching electronic beats and twanging sitar. When I play
Elena on my RealPlayer, though, it assigns the genre
“Alt Country” to the disk. Alt Country. Kinda like
dubbing the Sex Pistols “Alt Pop,” I reckon.
Official
site
Robert Stribley
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