When a song is good enough, it doesn’t need a great deal of ornamentation. Lacrymosa (Caitlin Pasko) demonstrates this beautifully, writing great songs, singing them and accompanying herself on piano, occasionally being joined by strings. It doesn’t hurt that she also has a gorgeous voice. I got her album I Was Once (Oh) in the mail a few days ago and have really been enjoying it. She’s one of my earliest and best discoveries on T61, where she was in the classical category. Does she fit? Not exactly sure. Her songs are somewhere between classical and pop. They do remind me a bit of Schubert’s songs for soprano voice and piano (I have an album of those, featuring soprano Kathleen Battle that I highly recommend – had to dig it out and play it again now that I remembered it again). On her MySpace page, Caitlin describes her music as “whimsical forest music,” which is as good a classification as any.
Lacrymosa’s album contains my favorites, “Weltschmertz (The Smitten Song),” “Wolf Snare” and “Soldier On (Blue Flowers)” and five other lovely songs. It can be purchased from Family Records in either mp3 downloads or on a CD-R. (Only one issue: I got the disk and when I went to rip it, found that the song order on the list was incorrect. I was able to sort it out with the help of her MySpace page. If you just want to pop it in the stereo that probably won’t be a big deal, but I might get the mp3s if I had it to do over.)
If you’re a former or current T61 user, you probably already know about this promising artist. Even so, I encourage you to take that next step and buy her album. If you never heard of her before this, check out her songs on MySpace and see if you don’t agree that she deserves your support. She also has a few videos of live performances. Unfortunately I can’t post them here as they’re on Vimeo and won’t embed on WordPress.
You can find her record for sale here: I Was Once (Oh)
