Scarnella at The Troubador

Scarnella are not for everyone. Their music has an experimental flavor to it. They do retain some melody and chord structure, but there's a lot of playing around with sonic textures. Carla has a sampling keyboard, and she's constantly loading in new samples throughout the show and shoving little bits of paper in between the keys to hold them down while she plays bass or guitar. Nels plays guitar and a little bit of kick drum. Much of the time, Nels plays his guitar with various objects, like kitchen utensils and curling irons. Then he'll turn around and capture that in a digital delay loop (I'm assuming here) and leave it looping while they play a song.

The songs are mostly plaintive or even mournful, which suits Carla's vocal style, which has a kind of melancholy feel to it. I can't imagine her singing the Happy Happy Joy Joy song. :-). Carla kept apologizing for playing such a sloppy show, but I barely noticed. There were a couple of times when I noticed that she reacted as if she played something wrong, but I don't have their CD yet, so I wouldn't have noticed if she hadn't reacted (as is often the case). Anyway, very good show. If you're into experimental rock, then I definitely recommend you check Scarnella out.