Over the Rhine @ the Triple Door

Last night was our first live encounter with Ohio's Over the Rhine, and the Triple Door turned out to be the perfect venue for the neo-cabaret sound of their new album The Trumpet Child (which they're streaming on their site). Tonight's show is sold out, but they're doing SRO sales at the window. The Triple Door website will tell you the show's at 8pm, but we showed up at 7:45pm last night and got sat during opener Griffin House's set.

Musically, neo-cabaret, like we said. As they kicked off with "I Don't Wanna Waste Your Time" and a cover of "You Give Me Fever," we had the unsettling feeling that Karin Berquist and Linford Detweiler were being played by Rosanna Arquette and Ric Ocasek in the movie about the songwriting couple about to make it big (or bigger, anyway). They're backed by drums and bass, but it's mainly Detweiler's jazz-inflected piano and Berquist's breathy alto that make the magic happen. The lyrics are, even at their most joyful, tinged with that sadness that's part of the poetic enterprise, catching moments in words before they're too-soon gone.

The Trumpet Child reflects their updating of the American songbook, with its jazz cafes and cabarets and Tin Pan Alley tunesmiths, and also hymns, songs of joy or praise that you'd hear through the doors of a church Sunday mornings. (Detweiler is the son of a minister.) The title track is an instant jazz anthem. But these days, the album is almost sui generis -- certainly "If A Song Could Be President" is, despite its nods to American songwriter greats. It's so American old-school it's almost AM radio friendly. "Nothing Is Innocent" travels darker, alt-folk ground about living in the U.S. today, a minor-key protest song. (You may also like their coffee, which they pitched from the stage. Probably that doesn't seem as odd in Ohio as it does in caffeine-drenched Seattle.)

We heard four or five songs from Nashville's Griffin House. The partial set got us ruminating about the surfeit of singer/songwriters out there with difficult personal lives and a love/hate relationship with the call of the open road. We liked "Never Again," which begins "Never again am I gonna give my heart to a bullshit cause/I’ve had enough of lies and dark/Never again am I gonna waste my time on a bullshit road/It’s never been a friend of mine/Simple words from a simple man." We didn't like it a lot -- it just seemed frank and honest, and we were okay with that.