Month: January 2007

music With all the mesh shirts, laced corsets and school girl skirts favored by women in the local goth scene, I could have easily been distracted at Outback Lodge on January 6. But not even all that exposed flesh could take my attention away from In Tenebris, the night’s headline act. The band offers a hard-rocking show that sets a crowd in motion and leaves everyone wanting more.

Rose between thorns: Christina Fleming lets her vocals loose, and the rest of In Tenebris follows behind.

The opening acts were Andsvara, a side project of local metal chanteuse Kim Dylla (see her with This Means You), and the Opposite Sex, a D.C. band that wowed everyone by using a baritone sax in lieu of a guitar for their first song. Both bands delivered solid performances and managed to lure patrons from their spots at the bar.

But the true darling of the night was In Tenebris, hands down. Taking its name from the Latin for “in darkness,” the band showcased the soaring, operatic voice of Christina Fleming—her years of classical training evident in the way she effortlessly glided from note to note in impossibly high ranges. Metalheads, think Tarja Turunen. Everyone else, think Sarah Brightman, and you’re not far off.

Fleming and guitarist Jdavyd Williams form the group’s core, with both sharing songwriting responsibilities. Whatever they’re doing, it works. The band’s songs are contemplative without devolving into the pity party that is common to other groups in the goth scene.
Pounding drums, up-and-down bass lines and heavy guitar riffs in songs like “Chrysalis” suggest In Tenebris legitimate hard-rock know-how. Dance-friendly, electronica-influenced pieces like “Haunted” show that the group is comfortable in its own skin and able to work outside of any rigidly defined genre. This band is going places; be sure to snag a copy of their first full length album, which is slated for release in March.

gallery Just like the United States, Australia lives with a messy history of contact between its Aboriginal people and the Europeans who arrived later. When this relationship erupts into art, if anything, more questions arise—as with Peter Eve’s photographs of the Kimberley region, paired with paintings by Aboriginal artists from that area.

Bold portraits like "Rammey Ramsey" make for a stark contrast to lush landscape shots in Peter Eve’s photography exhibit.

Eve presents two types of images here: sumptuous nature photographs, as aloof and violently colorful as anything in a Sierra Club calendar, and black-and-white portraits of Aboriginal people, shot in a hard-nosed journalistic style. The viewer veers between admiring the exotic hue of cliffs in the Carr Boyd Range (like our own red clay, but turned up a thousand notches) and intimately encountering Paddy Bedford, a white-haired man sitting in a pickup truck with a shepherd dog in the bed.

It’s certainly a finely made image. You can almost smell the sun on his skin, feel the road’s dust, breathe the smoke from his cigarette. The truck’s window makes a second frame around man and dog, increasing the sense of their being distanced from the viewer. Indeed, a social context for Bedford, and the other people in the photos, is hard to grasp. Does Eve see them as stewards of this stunning place? As victims? Artists (which many are)? Sometimes they’re shown entwined with the landscape (Peggy Patrick stands within a fallen tree branch, its shadows crossing her face); sometimes they look more like visitors (Rusty Peters sits tentatively on a rock near Black Rock Pool, wearing jeans and sport sandals, holding a pack
of cigarettes).

The dualities—between the portraits and landscapes, between Eve’s photos and the paintings that fill the rest of the museum—are troubling, if we imagine that Eve is not confronting them. The show is too small, and too thinly curated, to know for sure.