CD Review

Licorice - "Sulk"

by Dan Century

Imagine…you're alone on a bitterly cold, rainy night. You're soaked to your underwear and miserable. You stumble along an unfamiliar, seedy boardwalk lined with flophouses and gin mills packed to the gills with cut-throat thieves, blood thirsty seamen and diseased whores - like a scene from a Thomas Pynchon novel, a Tom Waits song, or maybe Chris Elliot's Cabin Boy - a place so revolting even the shadows stink! You hear music belching from one of the saloons - well, it's kind of like music, but it's more like a cat being disemboweled on the keys of a piano. A salacious criminal jumps from the shadows with a rusty fish knife in one hand and his syphilic penis in the other. He likes you. You have little choice but to run to the safety of the saloon. Slip past a few more shady characters and "belly up to the bar." The bartender rings a mop into a glass and takes your last dollar. You turn from the bar and at the piano there's a, umm, man (you think), kind of like a cross between Dr. Franken Furter, Rip Taylor and a hairy insect. He's the cat being violated on the piano "singing" his heart out on open mike night at the filthiest bar in the world. Right before you pass out from the toxic brew in your glass, you hear "my name is Licorice, good night."

Ok, that's what Licorice is like. It's part Cabaret, part Rocky Horror, part Tom Waits, part Kurt Veil, but mostly it's a guy who's really sad because his friends are screwing other more lively and entertaining people. A voice, a piano and occasionally a techno beat - minimalism and melancholy on a budget. He probably appears at local clubs and coffeehouses and has enough friends and fans to scrape together the money to release a CD. Congratulations!

Hopefully one of his friends will screw him and end the pain.

Contact Information:
Post: PO Box 1234 Portland, Oregon 97207-1234
E-Mail: snobmail@jps.net
Web: http://www.jps.net/licorice