Strange fruit

Heart of the Geraldine Fibbers' darkness

by Sydney Pokorny

Despair rocks on, whether it's in the form of Prodigy/Nine Inch Nails-style techno angst, the multiplatinum abjection of Marilyn Manson, or, farther down the charts, the navelgazing whine of indie faves like Smog. But few artists have the gift for transforming pain and angst into catharsis and redemption like the Geraldine Fibbers, a noisy five-piece country-influenced band from LA who'll headline upstairs at the Middle East in Cambridge a week from Saturday.

In a previous incarnation fronting Ethyl Meatplow, Fibbers singer/songwriter Carla Bozulich screeched, shouted, and shrieked over a dancy techno background, mostly to shock effect. With the Fibbers she has found a powerful voice capable of generating more than mere controversy. It's a voice cut by deep rivers of sadness, one rich and resonant enough to bring to mind poet Frank O'Hara's description of Billie Holiday: "She whispered a song along the keyboard . . . and everyone and I stopped breathing," O'Hara wrote in 1959.

Billie's voice -- even in her later years, when it was frayed by dope and booze -- mirrored her life. Embattled, defiant, troubled, and unafraid to be so, she sang honestly of disappointments laced with anger and bitterness. Her voice conveyed sadness and empowerment. Different as the Fibbers' mix of country, noise, and pop is from Holiday's jazz, Bozulich can conjure the scratchy, dissipated, dripping-with-sadness spirit of Holiday's voice. On Butch (Virgin), the Fibbers' second album, her vocals run the gamut from punk caterwaul to country crooning, but it's all tied together by her gritty emotions, which capture both the beauty and the brutality of everyday life. She can make you feel the sorrows that have etched her voice without uttering an intelligible word.

When a linear narrative does emerge, the story almost invariably comes with a not-so-happy ending. "Trashman in Furs," one of the more gently melodic tunes on Butch, turns out to be a mournful communion with a friend dying of AIDS. Elsewhere Bozulich offers more songs about the streetwalkers, jilted lovers, junkies, and drifters who populated the band's 1995 debut, Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home (Virgin). It is tempting to look for parallels between Bozulich's own life and the scenarios she depicts: she's a former heroin addict who has been clean for 10 years. But she's also an inventive storyteller whose songs are vignettes inhabited by fictional characters she has the sensitivity to portray. There are dark and dirty secrets to be exhumed in these metaphor-laced stories: "I Killed the Cuckoo" crests with her snarling "With your pussy lite feather flight lonely/Hour later I killed the cuckoo/The clock is dead once and for all/Till the next time I run with you/Doesn't her smile smack of starvation/Her legs outstretched toward her salvation." And "Toybox" is an uptempo punk shocker, punctuated by bloodcurdling daddy-bashing screams, about a seemingly incestuous relationship.

The Fibbers have often covered country tunes by male singers, from George Jones ("The Grand Tour," "If the Drinkin Don't Kill Me") to Willie Nelson ("Hands on the Wheel"). Indeed, Bozulich's deep, dry, dusty voice has been confused with a man's. She plays with that gender-bending effect: on Butch's title track her voice dips down into a deep resonating spoken burr ˆ la Barry White and then rises up into a dreamy, girlish falsetto over the course of a single sentence ("All you're left with is chaos and a dirty face"). As the band have grown, however, Sonic Youth-style dissonance and improv-tinged interludes have come to overshadow the country roots that flavored Lost Somewhere Between the Earth and My Home. (Instead of a country cover, Butch features a version of the krautrock group Can's "You Doo Right.") The group's newest recruit, guitarist Nels Cline, litters "Butch" -- a jazzy ballad about love, loss, and the trail of eyeliner on a tear-stained face -- with searing noise squalls bolstered by the fevered bowing of now departed violinist Jessy Greene.

Against this serrated backdrop, Bozulich screams, coos, and purrs in a disarmingly tender fashion. The rocky noise creates a striking contrast for lyrics ripe with florid, sensual metaphors. And yet the country darkness that inspires Bozulich still gathers in the distance. "Look at all the peaches waving from the shore," she sings on "Swim Back to Me" -- "Another taste of honey to kill or to ignore." Not far from the kind of strange fruit Billie Holiday might have wrapped her transcendent voice around.