Over the Rhine

Item: Good Dog Bad Dog: The Home Recordings
Author: Brad Caviness

Good Dog Bad Dog: The Home Recordings

(1996)

Reviewed by Brad Caviness

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Label Scampering Songs7ball Online 1996Online 1996

acoustic chamber pop folk singer-songwriter

After three years and three cd's (one new and two reissues), Over the Rhine has pulled up stakes at I.R.S. Records and returned to the fierce independent spirit that made them so noteworthy in their beginning. With the release of their new indie cd Good Dog Bad Dog (the home recordings), OTR sets themselves again directly into the hands of their audience, and hopefully greener pastures, while they search for a new record deal.

Good Dog Bad Dog was made in just a couple of weeks without the support of a major label. The instrumentation is sparse and intimate, often only just a piano or acoustic guitar augmented by cello. Many of Karin Bergquist's vocal performances on the album were the first time she had sung the song into a microphone. I mention this only because to just listen to the record, you would think it had been painstakingly pored over for months. Every performance is near perfect. Every detail is near flawless. The emotional undercurrents sway convincingly from tears to jubilation. Though most of these songs have already evolved significantly, as any observer at an OTR concert could tell you, the idea they could be improved upon is patently absurd.

Over the Rhine's words again poetically evoke the pull of the flesh on the soul, folding together the sensual and the spiritual. "Will a man called Jesus ever touch me on my face?" Bergquist asks in "A Gospel Number," looking to "Fly like the sparrow and ride on the backs of the angels tonight" ("Poughkeepsie").