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The Cleveland Free Times
November 16, 1994

by Anastasia Pantsios

GOING TO TOWN

Most rock music doesn't seem to come from a particular place. You can take the average rock song, set it down in any environment, and it's equally at home. Over the Rhine's music, on the other hand, is redolent of location. It clings to them; their songs have color and scent and taste. They even create environment at their shows, with the almost corny device of lining the stage apron with candles. They say it was purely a matter of practicality - to give the audience some sort of lighting on a limited budget - but it suggests that surroundings are important to this band.

Environment seems to play a role in all phases of the Cincinnati quartet's creative process, from the old church where they rehearsed until it was sold recently, to their recording sessions in Nashville for their last album Patience ("August came with a brutal heat," say the liner notes. "We swooped down on Nashville like so may migrating blackbirds for a pregnant week of night recordingâ¤|Karin would sing and the sun would rise out of the microphone and we would go to bed in this new daylight"), to the mixing sessions for their recent Eve, "mixed down in the low end of the world under the streaming sun in the French quarter of New Orleans."

OtR first attracted significant attention outside of Ohio when IRS Records picked up the self-produced Patience for distribution last year after signing the band. (Eve is the first album the band made under that contract.) Then began the frequent comparisons to another band of atmospheric pop/rockers with an aura of pastoral innocence: upstate New York's 10,000 Maniacs. The comparisons were partially apt. Both featured sparkling-voiced female vocalists whose delivery eschewed knowingness; both bands wrote wistful, delicately melodic songs that seemed intimately familiar with country-encroaching small towns, partaking of both their charm and their claustrophobia. OtR vocalist Karin Bergquist crooned the wafting melodies and pastoral lyrics composed by herself, bassist Linford Detweiler, guitarist Ric Hordinski and drummer Brian Kelley. On Patience, she was singing of dreaming down by the river, climbing branches and vines, and, "rhyming myriad lines/full of your face and the gleam of the moon" ("I've Been Slipping"). Restrained, well-defined guitar and keyboard lines and light-wristed drums held her voice up for display like an intricate but unobtrusive frame. Add to that a CD booklet decorated with tiny, prim Rockwell Kent woodcuts and the evanescent photos of one of Detweiler's best friends, Michael Wilson. Patience made it easy for Over the Rhine to acquire a reputation as a romantic, nostalgic, arty, rather precious bunch.

Eve signaled a dramatic change. Bergquist was always a more sultry singer than the Maniacs' relentlessly girlish Natalie Merchant. But now she's a chanteuse, murmuring the torchy "Sleep Baby Jane" and the bluesy "My Love Is A Fever" with an edge of weariness, like a younger sister to Cowboy Junkies' Margo Timmons, one who hasn't yet thrown in the emotional towel. The intense sense of place is still there. But the place is no longer a countryside of fields and rivers and waterfalls, but a nighttime city of clubs releasing tendrils of blues and jazz into rain-slicked alleys each time a tired traveler calls it a night. OtR packed their bags, closed up the cabin and moved into the city.

There's a new depth and sadness in the intricate and inexplicable lyrics of "Confessions of a Guilty Bystander," with its wandering Tom Waits-like vibe, in the regretful "Should", a song about falling in love with an HIV-positive person: "bone dry/should I never dance/like Salome danced/bathing in rain/and moonlight/and flame/should I never sweat/surreal shadows/rushing through my veins/good red blood/run red|" This time, the instruments are a conversing chorus, mingling their textures with Bergquist voice. Eve, despite a title that initially suggests a sweeter, simpler time, is a sophisticated album. This Eve has tasted the apple.

Here's Detweiler's take on the band's altered attitude and aura. "We spent six months of last year traveling from big city to big city. We saw a lot of the world and maybe we lost a little innocence along the way. We made Patience after playing maybe 20 shows as a band. Between Patience and Eve, we played a couple of hundred. I would hope that some of that naive innocence that comes from isolation has been seasoned with a good, hard dose of reality."

Not that they ever lacked a sense of reality. Formed by four ex-classmates from Malone College in Canton after they moved to Cincinnati, OtR played regionally and released their own CD. Their first Cleveland show was at Peabody's Cafe in 1990. They've been regular visitors since, often playing the Symposium and the Grog Shop, as well as numerous concert opening slots (thanks to Michael Belkin, who was an early fan). They recorded Patience themselves before being picked up by IRS. They are self-supporting as a band and, despite their current major label status, they still do much of the base-building work themselves. Their work ethic seems at odds with their bucolic, ivory-tower image - until it becomes obvious that, although they'd like to make some major professional advances, they are not only in it for the money and the champagne. Says Detweiler (more than once), "All I want out of this is a nice farm somewhere."