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Chao | HitsTheMiss

Style-hopping indie-pop from Texas.
CD, Last Beat

Tekst: Wilko van Iperen

Publicatiedatum: 18 april 2002

Chao's debut album HitsTheMiss shows that Regina Chellew has many faces, each song showing a different one. The songs that didn't fit the repertoire of Captain Audio, her former band, made it onto HitsTheMiss. On the whole, Chao sounds somewhere between Chan Marshall's Cat Power and The Pixies gone mellow. HitsTheMiss starts off with Gotta Go, an indie-pop tune driven by a funky bassline and drum rhythms recalling Cannonball by The Breeders. Songs like Bugs and Low are - although completely different - good tunes without any pretensions, probably the only two songs where Chellew lays herself open and gives the songs her own personal touch. Although most of the songs do sound alright, Chellew seems to need a musical style to get it out: Instead of giving the album a spontaneous feel, it ends up sounding quite forced. Dylan's Lay Lady Lay gets a cover treatment, and - duetting with Marcus Striplin of Pleasant Grove - both sultry voices make it a pleasant listen, but it's not as entranced as Dylan sounds. The Spanish-flavoured Whisper takes us to the Bowie-ish This Love, one of the strongest songs on the album. In this song of her own, Chao is closer to putting her finger on what Bowie was all about than she manages to do in the Dylan cover. The slightly superfluous old-fashioned rocker Fire makes Chellew take a seat at the piano and "do a Tori Amos" in Roll Me. The album gets a bit of a country ending with Country Song and Something For Joey, which is I Wanna Be Sedated by the Ramones in a slow Texas style. Because Chao puts you up with a different music style every song, it all in all doesn't satisfy completely. Not a heavens-conquering album, but at the same time not too bad at all.

http://www.kindamuzik.net/recensie/chao/hitsthemiss/1475/
Meer Chao op KindaMuzik: http://www.kindamuzik.net/artiest/chao