What do Porno for Pyros, Nirvana, Bob Mould and Marilyn Manson all have in common? For one, Rasputina's Melora Creager, who served as cellist for Nirvana's In Utero tour, and whose merry band of miscreants opened for these other acts during Rasputina's late-'90s stint on Columbia Records. But after 15 years, and a switch to indie label Filthy Bonnet Co., the group's rotating lineup is still at it with its sixth full-length album, Oh Perilous World, another chapter in Rasputina's dusty tome of shoes and ships and sealing-wax, cellos and corsets.
The album, which finds Creager alongside drummer Jonathon TeBeest and returning cellist Sarah Bowman, continues Rasputina's fixation with the old and fantastic, while blending in a postmodern pastiche of references both incidental and musical. Much of the album's logorrhea, in fact, came from Creager compiling too-weird-to-be-true snippets from the daily news.
For "In Old Yellowcake," we're told, some of the lyrical imagery derived from the destruction of Fallujah. Not that you'd necessarily know it from the feisty Zeppelin groove driving the whole shebang, or, when that groove pauses for a breath, lyrics like "curtains all lacy and spattered with blood / We find crutches in the corner and bullets on the shelves / which I dismiss at once as being equivalent, irrelevant in and of themselves."
But, despite the gothy costumery, topical lyrics and distortion-laden cellos, it's not all a dark trip. The Beatlesque "Oh Bring Back the Egg Unbroken" is as weirdly sunny as anything the eggmen ever cooked up, with its insistent cadences of "Ooh-wah-o!" So whether you like your Rasputina sunny-side up or a bit blackened, plenty of each await on Oh Perilous World and -- for Pittsburghers -- at the Rex Theatre this Thu., Dec. 13.
Rasputina 7:30 p.m. Thu., Dec. 13. Rex Theatre, 1602 E. Carson St., South Side. $15. All ages. 412-381-6811 or www.rextheatre.com
