Eshtine

album review: Over the Rhine's Good Dog Bad Dog

An excerpt:

The band takes its name from a predominantly German neighborhood in Cincinnati (so German, the joke went, to cross into this territory meant going "over the Rhine"). Perhaps I relate to the band's worldview because I, too, grew up in a German area of a Midwestern city. Something about Good Dog Bad Dog evokes a sense, not of place, but of the spirit of a place, and the spirit is familiar to me. It's as if each city in town has a soul, something that makes it unique. The soul cannot be captured facilely with a camera or a curt description. Somehow Over the Rhine has turned phrases and notes into a net to catch the deep meaning of where they are. Call the result "mystical Midwestern."

It's a sound from the same territory as the odd photographs in the CD booklet. They share sepia tones, shadows, blurs and fades, obscured faces. In a song like "Faithfully Dangerous" Bergquist's vocals evoke a wicked jazz singer from early in the last century, someone we might only see today in an old photograph. But the sound is not what you'd hear back then, just as the photograph would not be what you would have seen at the time. The photo acquires its enigmatic quality through the fading and discoloring of age; the music, too, uses its many years of distance to layer on its mystique.

Read the whole thing at Thunderstruck.