The Rescues: The Rescues

Released June 1, 2017

’Tis the season for albums to be drop, drop, dropping ahead of summer tours. It’s like a tropical Christmas for music lovers!

The Rescues’ latest album, “The Rescues”

Somewhere between their sophomore 2013 outing, “Blah Blah Love War,” and their latest, eponymous¹ release, “The Rescues,” this Indie Supergroup has gone from a foursome to a threesome. The current line-up consists of out lesbian Adrianne Gonzalez (who has also performed solo and with others as Adrianne or, more recently, AG), Gabriel Mann, and Kyler England. I’m sorry to see the group lose Rob Giles, but this latest album is as strong as anything they have done previously.

The Rescues: Kyler England, Gabriel Mann, and Adrianne Gonzalez (AG).

If you need some background on The Rescues, you might start with the video of their early release, “Can’t Stop the Rain.” It’s an off-beat but catchy song. If you just can’t get enough of it, you might enjoy their more recent rendition of it, which features a fair portion of a marching band.

Or you could check out one of my favorite Rescues songs: “Break Me Out.” This is a live version the foursome performed back in 2010. It’s a great song, and I love the energy of the live performance. Plus, we get to see Adrianne front and center, which is always nice.

One more suggestion: The Rescues do a fascinating cover of Katy Perry’s “Teenage Dream.”

Anyway, that brings us to the album at hand. The first song I heard off this album was “Haunted.” There’s no video, per se, for it (ah, the joys of low-budget indie existence), except for a lyric video. If you can listen to this without getting goose bumps, well, it would make me wonder how much you have lived.

The refrain,

You can’t leave this life without being haunted
Somewhere between what you got and what you wanted

is powerful, but when Kyler begins listing the many kinds of things that haunt us, the song really cut me to the bone:

All the ones I couldn’t save
All the ones that slipped away
All the things I broke in two
All the times I cheated you
All the times I let you down
All the dreams I left to drown
All the ends I couldn’t change
All the times I turned away

It’s a brilliant piece of song-writing, arrangement, and performance. I’m sure some TV show will snap it up to use to add emotional punch to a pivotal emotional scene of some kind. (A number of the Rescues’ songs have shown up in the soundtracks of television shows.)

If “Haunted” is a bit too dire for you, the album also offers more uplifting fare, like, “We Are Not Alone” or “If It Were Not for You.”

The songs, the harmonies, the arrangements, the moods are all engrossing and wonderfully done. This is an album that I’ll be listening to all summer.

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Albums

Crazy Ever After (November 2008)

Let Loose The Horses (June 2010)

Blah Blah Love and War (November 2013)

The Rescues (June 1, 2017)

EP

The Rescues (March 2010)

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1. To avoid confusion, perhaps I should mention that the group also released an eponymous EP, “The Rescues,” in 2010. So this one is the eponymous album, not EP. What’s an “EP”? According to Wikipedia: “An extended play record, often referred to as an EP, is a musical recording that contains more tracks than a single, but is usually unqualified as an album or LP.” So a wee album or an album-ette, as it were. ↩

Damn, but I love music

One of my mother’s greatest gifts to me was sharing the many kinds of music she loved. She might follow Ravel’s Bolero with Sarah Vaughn with Rhapsody in Blue or a record of mariachi music she picked up in Mexico. Her influence helped create my very eclectic tastes in music, which is a very important part of my life.

The late, great Sarah Vaughan, one of Mom’s favorite singers.

Am I any kind of music professional? No. I taught myself to read sheet music in second grade, and I played first trombone in my high school’s marching band. Today I play a number of different instruments (badly). I also have the dubious distinction of having taught two different people how to play the saxophone even though I have never played it. When I was a kid, I was big on singing, but in my teens I developed a cyst on my vocal cords that ultimately ate the middle out of my range. This bummed me out greatly. That’s about the extent of my music credentials.

Oh, and often, when I sleep, my dreams are accompanied by music. My niece and I share the ability to “play” music in our heads, note for note — in my case, even very complex orchestral pieces.

While I could go on at length about my love of Chinese flower music or the English concertina, in this blog I want to focus on women making music, with a special emphasis on music by members of the LGBTQI community and their allies. Why did I choose that focus? Well, as in most things, it seems as though women don’t get as much ink (digital or otherwise), and anyway, it’s an area of music that encompasses a huge array of different instruments, styles, and attitudes — just the ticket for an eclectic listener like me!

I am old enough to remember sitting around a record-player listening with awe, excitement, and a little bit of terror to “Lesbian Concentrate,” which was at least the first lesbian musical (and poetry) anthology, if not the first explicitly lesbian album. How we howled at Meg Christian singing ”Ode to a Gym Teacher”! It was so new — it felt both so daring and a little bit naughty to be hearing it.

Front cover of “Lesbian Concentrate: A Lesbianthology of Songs and Poems,” which Olivia Records released in 1977.

For a time, a long time, the performers we had came almost exclusively from Olivia Records: Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Linda Tillery, Teresa Trull, and others. Now, we have come so far that I was reading a 2010 list of “The 50 Most Important Queer Women in Music”, and guess who wasn’t listed? Cris Williamson. That sort of blew me away. Her music was so important to so many of us. I don’t think many who followed would have followed if it hadn’t been for those intrepid foremothers of women’s music.

But I’m not here to teach history or rant about who got left out of a dumb article on a now-mostly-defunct web site. There is music happening, right now, all around us, and that’s what I want to focus on.