Intense, Purist, Catchy Tunesmithing and Devastating Wit from Elisa Peimer

by delarue

Singer/keyboardist Elisa Peimer is a lot smarter, and edgier, and funnier than your typical folk-pop songwriter. She has a distinctive, soul-infused, slightly throaty delivery, has a way with a classic pop hook and also a devastating wit. When her lyrics aren’t uproariously amusing, they’re a lot more subtle. Case in point: Better, the big, Celtic-flavored 6/8 ballad that opens her new album Inside the Glass, streaming at her webpage. It’s not a typical kiss-off song: instead of chronicling a list of misdeeds, Peimer puts a positive spin on an otherwise gloomy storyline. Will the girl in the narrative realize that she can do better than the guy she’s with, who’s always got one eye on whoever’s coming through the front door of the bar? No spoilers here. Peimer and her excellent band – whose core is Paul Cabri on guitars, Irwin Menken on bass and John Clancy on drums – are playing the album release show on June 12 at 6 (six) PM at First Acoustics Coffeehouse in the basement of First Unitarian Church, 50 Monroe Pl. at Pierrepont St. in downtown Brooklyn. Take any train to Borough Hall; cover is $10 and includes yummy vegetarian food.

The funniest song on the album is titled Good Song. Anyone in the arts can relate to this one – see, the girl in the story used to write one great tune after another until she finally got into a good relationship with a guy. Now she’s happy…but she’s miserable all the same since all her new songs are trite and cheesy. The last verse is priceless. Bad relationships: the gift that keeps on giving!

The band blazes through stomping, new wave-inspired powerpop in the bittersweet Good for You, a dead ringer for vintage early 80s Motels. Bobby Hollywood, another Celtic anthem, is Peimer at her crushingly sardonic best. In a couple of tersely crafted verses and a chorus, she nails the pathology of the kind of gentrifier narcissists who frequent places like the Union Square greenmarket:

I was buying Brooklyn pickles
Made by a hipster out in Queens
Surrounded by my neighbors
In their hundred dollar jeans
But the one that caught my eye
Was the one that didn’t care
About the cooking demonstration
‘Cause Bobby Hollywood died right there
..But the teller of the story
Seemed to vanish in the crowd
Lost in trucker hats and strollers
Of the financially endowed…

Aloft with pilllowy strings, the parlor pop ballad Poetry is a lot more enigmatic – until the ending, which is way too good to give away. Hint: this song is MEAN! The band gets electric again on It’s All Right, a mashup of Rolling Thunder Revue Dylan and more recent folk-pop. Then Peimer switches to guitar for the delicously jangly, uneasly anthemic Can’t Make Me Stop Loving You.

She paints a guardedly hopeful late-winter tableau in Daffodils, then follows that with a considerably more morose, angst-infused parlor-pop ballad, What Would He Say. The album winds up with the towering, overcast art-rock anthem This Life. Another first-class release from a member of the Brooklyn-based Chicks with Dip songwriters’ collective, whose members include Aimee Van Dyne, Sharon Goldman, Carolann Solebello and several other cult favorite songsmiths..

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