Confessions and Concessions...

photo courtesy Ilana Gilbert, IG Photography

The Riverwest Public House Co-operative seems to be establishing a reputation as frequent host to some of Milwaukee's more avant-garde performers: unconventional folk rock ensembles, piano soloists and other such demiurgic musicians more inclined to use violas and xylophones as their lead instruments than electric guitars and drum kits.  

This past Friday's Women In Music headliners there - The Lady Cannon, Ilysa Spencer and Meadow Parish - while adhering to the use of the more traditional bass, guitar and drum arrangements (though The Lady Cannon did, of course, employ her oft used five string banjo), provided performances that night that were no less intriguing.  Meadow Parish, in particular, lead by Flojo pendant Sarah Marie Spielmann, put on a noteworthy and captivating set.

Meadow Parish is primarily the solo representation of Spielmann's stripped down, deceptively simple acoustic folk lamentations.  She performed the first three songs of her set in this manner, anyway, closing with a true to the original cover of The Vega Star's "The Children", before being joined on stage by The Vega Star's own bassist Stephen DeLassus, who provided uncharacteristically subdued intones.  The usually eccentric Jay Flash took the stage alongside Spielmann as well, adding to the remainder of the set an un-intrusive secondary guitar texture.  Parish's solo presence is more than effective in establishing an instant affinity with her audience, and in appointing a very sincere communion of sorts, but the added illustration and detail her accompaniment provided made her performance all the more engrossing.   

photo courtesy Ilana Gilbert, IG Photography

The moniker alone - Meadow Parish - conjures the solarized imagery of a lonely confessionary in the tall grass of a million acre plain.  You imagine altostratus clouds racing overhead, and you're enchanted and mesmerized, drawn and lured, toward the sound of Spielmann's fragile canticles.  She conveys her messages from an artistic disposition, like an abstract impressionism; her verses are a patchwork montage of troubling moments, and her choruses and refrains are, respectively, either final resolve, or irrevocable judgement.

The ornate piano and guitar serenade of "Ouvre Ton Cour", a very Flojo sounding composition from her forthcoming EP Turbinado Run, twinkles and blinks like some sort of beacon on a lighthouse that signals futilely to a sea of ships that have already wrecked.  The closing refrain of each verse, "kiss it away..." comes off as such a sparingly laid solution to a more complicated problem.  The surrender and insistence of the delivery make it clear, however, that the suggestion is more the bandage than the cure.  Spielmann's vocal work permeates here more often than soars, but never fails to keep a pure and gripping emotional hold.  

On the deleterious "Lady, Refuse", for example, she tells the tale of a woman wronged, and the anxious and uneasy provisions she makes in the moments before she confronts him.  It's told in snapshot imagery, her everyday patterns now so deliberately focused on, a new significance found in them, and her dutiful routines carefully executed while she contrasts her thoughts, concedes and adjudicates.  She makes preparation and braces herself to "do the right thing"; end the relationship, and thus that chapter of her life - in light of the unspoken he's done or been doing. Oh, and she will "fuck with his head", believe that... hell hath no fury like Meadow Parish.  

photo courtesy Ilana Gilbert, IG Photography

Sure, hymns themed in these kind of "soap operatics", woe begotten recitals of the injured and conflicted, could be regarded as relatively common song fodder, but Meadow Parish implies herself more as the voice of the angel on your shoulder, who tells you what the devil's done - and in all the tiny little heart wrenching details.  She can really offer no advice, she can only soothe by telling of how she's coped - and you find yourself solaced by the beauty in that pain.  As Spielmann herself relates: "I've been through some pretty dark times that still aren't all that far away from me.  I learned to heal through self-expression, and I try to open up everything; and when you can look inside and see that pain in someone else... for some of us, this is a balm."

Perhaps this lends itself to Meadow Parish's humble demeanor.  Spielmann is unassuming on stage, in her washed out blue jeans, midriff bearing tank top beneath a sleeve-less open vest.  Her eyes are grey, blue and sad, and her stature innocent as she speaks to a vicious and cruel world, one that requires her to be more synonymous with it than she would prefer.  Her heart is bruised and swollen from it, making it almost larger than her small frame can hold.  Tiny fingers pull delicately at the strings of her guitar, or strum softly behind an almost ethereal voice; letting it out moment by moment, string by string, and word by word.  She makes liturgy to her torment, as if there is simply nothing else she can do but immerse herself in it, and hope that forbearance will release her.

Meadow Parish, click the image to download FREE demo recordings.