There Goes the Bride
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On Enantiodromia, says Youssefi, “I wanted the material to be comprehensible to people. I wanted people to follow it.” The album is chock-full of unusual chord patterns, convoluted rhythmic structures, and dissonant harmonies: the moody melody of “Better End in Time” takes more unexpected twists than “Rikki, Don’t Lose That Number.” But its tunes are still more streamlined than the claustrophobic post-Beefheart roil of Bride of No No, and there’s no doubt you can sing along to them.
Youssefi had studied piano as a kid, but started playing again only in late 1997, when her roommate at the time, Nerves drummer Elliot Dicks, went home to Columbus, Ohio, and brought back his mother’s old Yamaha electric-acoustic piano. “I sat at it and realized that I had given up this thing that at some point I had really liked doing,” she says. She dug up her old instruction books and started taking informal classical lessons. “I didn’t envision myself giving a recital at Symphony Center,” she says; she had no greater ambition than to entertain herself by playing Bach. But before long she started coming up with song fragments of her own. “Sometimes I would take a break and tinkle around, do something, and think, ‘Oh, I should tape this.’”
Youssefi performs Saturday night at the Empty Bottle with Lux and drummer Ryan Rapsys; Parker will also play on a handful of songs.
