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January 28 - February 4, 2000

[Music Reviews]

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**1/2 Tara Jane O'Neil

PEREGRINE

(Columbia)

Tara Jane O'Neil's musical meditations on Peregrine are so dreamy and amorphous that listeners might want to reach into their stereos and just wrench the tunes out of there. That is, until the oblique, impressionistic music tows them into its altered, slo-mo state. Singer and multi-instrumentalist O'Neil was a force in the influential Louisville band Rodan, who spawned a number of other outfits, including O'Neil's next ensembles, Retsin and the Sonora Pine. She wanders an arty, folky path on this release, which was apparently taped at various apartments in New York City (including hers) in a fragmented manner consistent with her gauzy aural sensibilities. Layers of gently droning guitars, violin (from the Sonora Pine's Samara Lubelski), and other stringed instruments drift in and out of view and form the backdrop for O'Neil's plaintive but substantial vocals, which glimmer most alluringly on "The Fact of a Seraph." Percussive accents come from Andrew Barker's brush strokes on a drum set here and O'Neil's plinking thumb piano there.

-- Bill Kisliuk
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