Ollabelle 'Neon Blue Bird'

The band Ollabelle are getting set to release their latest work, "Neon Blue Bird." For those who are unfamiliar with this band, you are not unfamiliar with their style of music. That's because Ollabelle are something of an amalgam; you won't find them on your top-ten chart grubbing pop music charts; at the same time, they definitely incorporate elements of popular music in many of their songs. They also incorporate folk, jazz, blues, gospel, psychedelic, zydeco, ballad, and others I likely haven't even listed. I like Ollabelle best when they are actually in they are incorporating all these elements in the same song; even as other sounds are layering themselves on top of one another. It may sound like a listening frenzy but this is the payoff that the careful music listener gets.

A perfect example is the song from their new record, "Brotherly Love." Some would call this religious, bedtime storytelling. The song tells the story of Cain and Able but with a funky, mysterious underpinning that sounds like it's out of a James Bond film.

Another interesting thing about Ollabelle is that they are all multi-instrumentalists. There isn't really one 'lead' singer. The five member band has three male and two female performers and much of the time they spend harmonizing with whomever started the song off singing. I have seen them perform in New York City and this is certainly what happens in the live setting.

In 'Neon Blue Bird' Ollabelle deal with some serious themes in their songs. There is a spooky surrealism of a song like "Butcher Boy" which tells the story of a girl who hanged herself and left a note in her pocket about it. The synthesizers and slow piano processional lead to this songs frightening end.

One of the biggest themes in Ollabelle's music is love and loss. The ambling rockabilly of a song like "You're Gonna Miss Me" and "One More Time" moves seamlessly into the campfire-dungeon ritual of "Be Your Woman," and reminds the listener of all the common suffering the human condition is subject to.

Still, the paradox in this fact is that songs like "You're Gonna Miss Me," and "Be Your Woman" both make the listener want to get up and sing and dance. The anathematic hook of a song like "Dirt Floor" evokes a hypnotic call and response. "When I Remember to Forget" and "Wait for the Sun" are more pensive and invite the listener to turn inward, while still immersing the listener in the wonderful Ollabelle harmonies.

As I listen to Ollabelle I struggle to find some kind of blanket categorization for their music. The conga drums at the beginning of "Swanee River" evoke some kind of world music spectacular, the driving chaos of "Be Your Woman" could be found underscoring a chase scene of a film, the Biblical allusions all over the record could be heard in any church choir anywhere in the world, but that's not even it. Ollabelle are bigger than church preaching, they are bigger than film scoring; they are something of a post-feminist, post-Sunday-school, post-apocalyptic hybrid.

So if you're ready for the impending onslaught, whatever the future may hold, Ollabelle is ready with the soundtrack.

"Neon Blue Bird" will be released 8/16/11.