Artist: The Paper Raincoat
Date: March 11, 2008 11pm
Venue: Rockwood Music Hall
City: New York
Review by Karen Hester
The Paper Raincoat (Vienna Teng, Alex Wong, Amber Rubarth) played Rockwood Music Hall at 11pm. Someone described them as ‘very Brooklyn’ which captures it – lots of local place references, urban folk perhaps, with Vienna’s piano expertise and Alex’s mad percussion and guitar skills (skillz) rescuing songs from lack of rehearsal. They each led their own songs, sounding like solo artists playing with mates rather than a band (which is fine). Though I’m not into Vienna’s recent album, ‘City Hall’ is always heart-warming, ‘1br/1ba’ was made interesting with Alex hitting his box, and the two new songs were new and thus of interest.
Amber Rubarth played guitar and glockenspiel and looked freakily like Katie Holmes, with her wide down-turned eyes. She was sweet and cute and her songs were cute and sweet. Funny lyrics, catchy melodies, all about being broken up with. Hopefully she’ll expand her repertoire to include initiating-the-breaking-up lyrics as I did feel rather that she needed to be sat down and told that he wasn’t worthy of all these songs 🙂 Would need to see her play solo to determine whether she’s sickly in a bigger dose, or just as charming.
[The Paper Raincoat MySpace Site]
[read a review of the CD], Safe in the Sound