Happy Valentine's Day Springfield!

date: 2/21/07
location: Spot 6
show: The Freeform Shuffle with Shirrelle C Limes & the Lemons
cost: FREE!
things I missed to be there: Free drinks at The Note; Alvin Lau at the In-One-Ear; DJ Logan bay, VJ Just Joel, Rotten Milk and STRESS APE, Turtle Fur, and Mister Freedom at Sonotheque; Julian Pena, Kid Enigma, Rayaline and Mr Bobby at Tini Martini; MWC at Red Line Tap
reason for going: straight shot from my house down the Belmont bus

In today's episode, the warm weather fills our hero with false feelings of energy and lucidity, so he forgoes another full night's sleep for the friendly confines of Spot 6 and the Freeform Shuffle. We open with an establishing shot of the bar. Red walls, dark goth paintings with wild expressive brushstrokes. Cue confused, rambling, sleep-deprived voiceover:

Remember that game Monster Mash? It's surprisingly hard to explain so I'll provide a link. You have a box with a window with a picture of a monster. The monster's head, torso, and legs are all mismatched like some sort of Hasbro-brand exquisite corpse. It works like a slot machine, you pull a lever and the body parts all rotate independently, eventually coming to a stop and making a new monster. That's what Shirrelle C Lime's music sounds like, except instead of monster parts, it was as if Shirrelle was a mashup machine loaded with elements of songs from the soundtrack to the movie Tank Girl, creating some sort of dark wave riot folk.

Because I have a weird need to compare artists first to old Chicago bands, lemme get that out of the way now. My first reaction was that she sounded like the goth pop band Sister Soleil, but nobody even remembers them, so I guess it doesn't count. The second (real) comparison is a bit harder to make, not because it isn't apt, but because it's loaded. She sounds like Ani DiFranco. Saying anything sounds like Ani DiFranco is loaded because so many people think they know what Ani DiFranco sounds like based on a couple songs, or just one album or no albums at all but what she loos like and stands for. When I compare her to Ani DiFranco, I don't mean that she's all women's empowerment, Righteous Babe, worksong neofolk, but that she sounds specifically like Ani DiFranco ten years ago, when she recorded "Living in Clip". At that point Ani DiFranco was just starting to experiment, but not so much that she was all jazzy yet. Shirrelle C. sounded a lot like that, experimental and raw.
The last few years of computer technology have blurred the line between singer-songwriter and one-man-band. Shirrelle's website describes her as Columbia, MO's first one-woman quartet. Her band, The Limes, consists of a laptop, a light box and some electronics, and if you close your eyes, it sounds like a real band (as opposed to, you know, someone comically forcing a harmony out of each extremity). At no point in time did she remind me of the hundreds of women I've seen take the stage at dozens of open mic as songwriters (she had a fuckin compact light show!), but it's similarly hard to judge her as a whole band because of that raw quality I mentioned. At times, her voice broke through the machines she had it running through, and it sounded almost like she would become overpowered it. It was in those moments that she seemed like a (good) singer songwriter.