While Noe Venable's music is difficult to put in any kind of category for easy cataloging in reviews such as this I will say that her music lives and breathes through her voice and her lyrics. Her delicate voice from the very beginning when it comes at you a capella on the first track called Woods Part of When hypnotizes the listener and immediately draws you into her world.
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CEV: Tell me about what your fans will find tucked away in The Summer Storm Journals CD. How is it different than what has come before?
NV: Well, as I mentioned earlier, it was born of a period when I was facing a lot of big changes in my life. But whereas Secret Knots is somewhat fierce in the face of turbulence, I think Summer Storm Journals is quite a bit softer, more inward, with clearings and moments of peace. A lot of it is about what comes after the storm, or just before it. The calmness of feeling the ground beneath one's feet.
Tucked inside it, what will one will find? hmmmm... Various flora and fauna, two ice dragons, twinkling boats, a prayer for beauty, and an army of nows. You know, the usual. :)
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Always painting, never grooving or riffing in more normal ways. Scapes of many shapes. This is an outstanding work. Again Noe Venable shows herself to be one of the unique voices of our time.
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SF Chronicle rates The Summer Storm Journals amongst the best albums of 2007
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In 2004, when she packed up her guitar and notebooks and moved to New York, Venable, then 27, had already released five albums, written more than 500 songs and toured the country opening for Ani DiFranco. And although she was ensconced in a nurturing and supportive Bay Area neo-folk scene, Venable felt compelled to break away and re-examine her priorities. Her 2003 CD, "The World Is Bound by Secret Knots," was in part an exploration of the forces that hold life - and personal identities - together. Among other questions, it asked, "What kind of creature shall I be?" . . .
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As I keep trying to tell people, San Francisco's award-winning singer-songwriter Noe Venable has a ton of talent packed into her tiny frame. That's likely why Ani DiFranco keeps inviting her out on tour ... that, and, like DiFranco, she's got a wonderfully wacky sense of humor. Venable's latest album, her fourth and most complexly-titled, is also her most ambitious, seductive and engaging.
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...the eerie guitar effects and hypnotic loops that haunt the corners of songs such as "Feral" distance Venable even further from the conventional singer-songwriter genre, giving her more in common with Tom Waits and Radiohead than with Joni Mitchell or Bob Dylan.
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Maybe this is what Sheryl Crow would have sounded like if she had chased art over commerce, or maybe it's like Suzanne Vega streaking through the woods on opium.
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Noe Venable is, in fact, a San Francisco-based singer/songwriter with a sometimes scratchy, sometimes smooth, always provocative voice who writes like Emily Dickinson on mushrooms.
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FEMMUSIC Interviews Noe
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"Here we have a homegrown, full blown young musical visionary, and a window into a part of the new San Francisco sound. This train is headed somewhere..."
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"Only a couple of records lately have pulled me from song to song to the end; one was Van Morrison's Down the Road and the other was Noe Venable's Boots..."
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"Venable’s most recent album, Boots, was released this year on Petridish. It’s a fully realized ensemble piece, masterfully produced by bassist/keyboard player Todd Sickafoose."
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"...Enviaby literate and awesomely disciplined, Venable amplifies her power through a riveting soprano voice that stuns and enraptures so thouroughly that multiple listenings are required to begin unraveling her mysteries of music and meaning..."
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"...Venable's deftly veering vocals chill us with warbling wails and jar us with girlish shouts. It's the cry of Little Red Riding Hood lost in the woods and leaving a crumb trail of broken wolves behind her."
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“Noe Venable’s shivering, gravelly soprano and ghostly melodies are like poems and exorcisms...”
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“Her voice, a unique blend of boldness and vulnerability...”
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“Noe Venable is a treasure in her own right, with a bluesy soprano voice that gives flight to stories that tend to veer off the center of the singer/songwriter beaten track...”
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“She’s sweet, sad, and slightly odd, in refreshing, artful ways....”
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“...The good news is that my roommates don’t have to wear earplugs to tune out strains of “The More You Ignore Me” anymore. I have shared Noe Venable with them, and we can sit, melancholy and spacey together, one big happy family...”
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"Noe Venable's trio-- violin, acoustic bass, guitar, performs a dexterous live set, coaxing a slow surrender to the singer's charismatic voice (and her visions of sweet apocalypse)..."
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“I didn't know anything about music, so all of my intellect was not functioning -- I was reduced to the state of being a kid again," she says. "I didn't know how to play guitar. I just put my fingers down and made something that sounded, to me, pretty. Or ugly, depending. I had no expectations, no burdens, or idea about why I was doing it. I just did it....”
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“Artist of the month: NOE VENABLE. She is wise beyond her years. Precocious. But that’s beside the point. More importantly, she’s so no-nonsense that she would probably detest everything I’ve written about her this far. Truth is, her songwriting and singing would be great no matter what her age. The amazingly advanced quality is just put into greater relief by the fact that she is barely in her twenties...”
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“At best, a Venable performance -- whimsical, funny, impulsive, rapturous -- posits the idea of a darkly creative genius flailing away under the vaudevillian's tux and tails. Sneaking swigs from a flask of peppermint schnapps, she's delirious from the power of her warring impulses...”
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“...Noe's truly poetic lyrics and theatrical background (she's worked with local visionary George Coates) put her on an entirely different planet than most young women with a guitar slung about their necks. Think Tom Waits or Rickie Lee before you'd ever reach for that Lilith Fair stereotype...”
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“Venable has the voice, the imagination, and the cojones to make any dirge seem urgent, and if you're lucky, she may even stare you down for new material...”
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“Noe Venable isn't really a jazz singer. She is definitely a jazzbo. She doesn't know what to call her music, exactly. ``Depends on my mood, and the weather,'' she says. ``If I'm carrying an electric guitar, I say klezmer. If I'm carrying an accordion, I say country.'...”
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"I saw a man fall through the street at Leavenworth and Eddy," begins "Five on the Dime," the first song on Noe Venable's, No Curses Here. It's just one in a seemingly endless supply of images from Venable's treasure chest of creativity...”
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“...The album's bittersweet vignettes introduce Venable as a compelling storyteller with a keen eye for detail, a radiant vocalist who sings with a poet's pathos about the shadows and secrets of the downtrodden. She's the freshest voice in San Francisco...”
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“WZ: What would you call your way of working and approaching your ideal?
NV: Sometimes it's excavation. Dig for bones, then brush at them until the dust shows what has been hiding. Maybe then put flesh on the bones and bring some weird old unknown creature to life...”
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“...Her head tilts backwards, her long hair falling down her back she opens her eyes wide -- they seem to wander back and forth like searchlights along an imaginary picture molding high on the saloon's far wall -- and she sings "January," the first of the set's 10 numbers, all carefully crafted originals...”
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