Rachel's - reviews - Sunday Times, October 5th 1997 + NME, October 11th 1997

The Sunday Times, Culture section, October 5th 1997.
Stewart Lee

Late last month, Cecil Sharp House, the English Folk song Society HQ in Regent's Park, hosted the UK debut for Rex and Rachel's, twin leading lights of a hardy hybrid strain of American post-rock dynamics and folk classical sensibilities. A 500-strong crowd on plastic seating saw Rachel's showcase last year's essential Sea & the Bells album, a requiem for clipper ships made up of delicate instrumentals - guitar and drums weaving between strings and piano.
Rachel's are one of a host of uniformly excellent bands straddling their home, rural Louisville, Kentucky, and the studios and venues of nearby Chicago, who share common aims, a common ancestry and common living and rehearsal spaces. "Louisville is just ... out of it," says Rachel's guitarist, Jason Noble, "so we all take inspiration from things as diverse as 40-year-old jazz records, reading a lot of books and the climate here, which is very dramatic."
Louisville was also the home to American post-rock's pilgrim fathers, Slint, who disbanded at the turn of the decade, core members currently recording with the For Carnation, Aerial M, King Kong and Tortoise. "I saw Slint when I was 15," recalls Noble. "I could have thought: why bother playing music anymore? That's as good as it gets. But instead of being dismayed, I was encouraged."
Ironically, Noble's own previous band, Rodan, have now assumed the same mythology as Slint, disappearing after one album in 1994 to filter into the finest American bands, the folksy Sonora Pine, symphonically complex noise rockers June of '44, and the Shipping News, Noble's current collaboration with Rodan co-founder Jeff Mueller. Their debut, Save Everything (Quarterstick), is a devastating fusion of impossibly heavy guitars and baroque finesse.
Onstage, Rachel's reflect their disregard for rock conventions. Pianist Rachel Grimes scored their Music for Egon Schiele album as a live ballet soundtrack, and Cecil Sharp House saw Louisville artist Greg King back-projecting appropriate cine-images while Grimes luxuriated in the venue's grand piano. Support Rex, a New York group commonly assumed to be part of the Kentucky clique, heroically duelled with the venue's PA's volume limiter to deliver a curiously appropriate folk-tinged set of thrilling complexity. "We get described as a Chicago band back home in New York," laughs Rex guitarist Curtis Harvey. "We kind of fell into that group of musicians. I feel lucky and honoured to be part of that scene."
Rex, whose new album, 3 (Southern), is their most accessible yet, soften and stretch the mathematical geometry of the Slint template with bizarrely successful folk and country influences. The track Waterbug's chiming music-box strings suggest Michael Nyman scoring Deliverance, while Balloon might be the year's most beautiful folk song.
Rachel's and Rex take post-rock full circle. The scene that spawned them broke rock apart, enabling its survivors to make new shapes, alongside influences from folk, country and classical music, which the dogmatists of the 1980s would have gagged on. Now they can engage the heart as well as the head.

NME, October 11th 1997
Kitty Empire

You can't get much less rock than this. We're in a wood-pannelled auditorium that feel like a school assembly hall, only it's the headquarters of The English Folk and Dance Society. There's a little box on the wall which monitors the frequencies of tonight's proceedings - and cuts out the PA if it gets too loud. Which, irritatingly, is about every two minutes during the very lovely Rex's set of intense, country-dusted whispers. Aaargh.
Still, in theory, you can't get much less rock than Rachel's: a piano, a violin, a viola, a bit of guitar and bass and some drums have made it over here this time (there are 17 musicians credited on their last album, "The Sea and the Bells"). They're not so much post-rock as pre-rock: making moody music for low-fi fans who require more than a detuned banjo.
So everyone is respectfully seated and Jason Noble (guitar, mostly) is telling an extended joke about a duck, in between strung-out violin arpeggios and sad piano chords. Rachel herself sits primly at the keys, meandering through "Rhine And Courtesan" or tearful string workouts like "Second Self-Portrait Series".
Refined music. Cerebral sounds.
And then all hell breaks loose. "Lloyd's Register" starts out as a gentle meditation, but builds into a fearsome surge, all banshee strings and shipwreck rhythms making the PA fart and the box on the wall smoke. Gradually, the storm passes. All is quiet and sad once again, but a roomful of people is whooping and cheering, and you feel like telling the night porter they'll need to get some morris dancers in first thing Monday to reconsecrate the place. For it has been truly rocked.

Melody Maker, October 25th 1997
Neil Kulkarni at Cecil Sharp House

IT'S rammed. It feels like An Event. And I'm sulking.
OK, I get shushed and it urks (my lighter's knackered, I'm sparking away to no avail, when a swaying hippy in front of me turns around and, fingers on lips, goes shhhh, with a very disapproving look on her cowish face), but it's more than that. Everyone's sat down, determined to have a serious, intense, reverent experience tonight, and that's an order. I'm pissed and giggly and I feel a bit like Mr Blobby at a state funeral. Thank God Rachel's are on f***ing fire this evening.
Every creak and sigh and break is intact. A grand piano, two violins, a guitar and drums roll out all the hits; a backdrop of desperate images either takes you along with it or complements the varying moods sharply. What's soon clear is the fact that Rachel's are far from studio-spun; are in fact an act of real spontaneity, mining areas of instrumental depth and interplay that we're all probably gonna see creeping into much American rock over the next few years.
The between-song banter is a bit lame, but this appearance is so long awaited that it's all greeted like crap gags on centre court, and "Self-Portrait" has the hippy chick actually lolling over on to my feet in rapt abandonment. So I shush her vehemently.
Of course, you don't have to "see" Rachel's "live"; just like you don't have to see "L'Aventura" the musical, or "Rothko's Murals: The Ice Dance Spectacular".
Rachel's as an experience are contained in those three incredible albums. This Big Night Out works, but even more powerfully, it insists that you spend the next few nights in. Shhhhhh.

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