The Living Sisters – Love To Live – 2010
Artist: The Living Sisters
Title: Love To Live
Genre: Indie, Acoustic, Folk
Release date: March 30, 2010
Time: 33:29
Tracklist:
01. How Are You Doing (2:13)
02. Ferris Wheel (3:12)
03. You Make Me Blue (3:23)
04. Cradle (3:08)
05. Good Ole Wagon (4:07)
06. Hold Back (2:58)
07. The Mountain Has Skies (3:46)
08. Double Knots (2:51)
09. (You Don’t Know) How Glad I A (4:19)
10. Don’t Let The Sun Go Down (3:36)
March 30, 2010 | 10:33 am
This utterly charming debut from L.A. indie music pals Inara George (The Bird and the Bee), Becky Stark (Lavender Diamond) and Eleni Mandell may warrant the creation of a new life category: triplets separated at birth. OK, so it's not going to get a lot of use, but the empathetic symbiosis at play in these 10 sweetly ethereal performances deserves some kind of category of its own.
The closest pop antecedent for the ersatz sibling harmonizing over endearingly low-fi subject matter going on here would be that of the Roches, bona fide biological sisters. Mandell's "Ferris Wheel" dreamily elegizes that boardwalk thrill of yore.
There are songs about babies and cradles -- no great leap given that George was pregnant while they were working on the CD. Some are engagingly innocent, some are gently sexy, as the trio members weave together '40s pop vocalizing, '50s doo-wop, jazz, folk and country elements in a seamless mélange.
In fact, the whole outing feels like a throwback to a time and place in American culture that probably never actually existed, yet it's no less rewarding to revel in music that imagines it did. It's lightweight, but so is a perfect soufflé.
The threesome has been performing around the Southland on and off for years, and whether this moonlighting project has a recording future beyond this effort is anybody's guess. The great thing about today's age of unhinged music-making is that quirky one-offs like this can crop up and live for precisely as long as they need to.
-- Randy Lewis
The Living Sisters
"Love to Live"
(Vanguard)
Three stars (Out of four)
http://www.myspace.com/thelivingsisters
http://www.myspace.com/elenimandell
http://www.myspace.com/inarageorge
http://www.myspace.com/lavenderdiamond
An achingly slow Western waltz, The Living Sisters' "This Mountain Has Skies" evokes the wide-open geography and clear air of its lyric.
http://www.last.fm/music/The+Living+Sisters
Photo by Laura Heffington
Photo by Laura Heffington
Photo by Laura Heffington
Photo by Laura Heffington
live at the echoplex (may 01, 2007) - photo by Joshua J. Smelser
live at the echoplex (may 01, 2007) - photo by Joshua J. Smelser
Photo by Autumn DeWilde
Photo by Autumn DeWilde
Becky Stark / Lavender Diamond
Lavender Diamond
Lavender Diamond
http://aurgasm.us/2010/02/the-living-sisters/
Pure, unfiltered loveliness.