Gentle fury
The Scarlet Furies rock their folk at Coffee Gallery Backstage Friday
By Bliss 09/08/2011
There’s been a welcome crop of female singer-songwriters blossoming across the musical landscape in recent years, but the surplus of waifish, affectless voices is wearying. It is as if a generation of breathy Barbies all studied with the same vocal coach, yielding thin, surface-pretty sopranos that convey little sense of life experienced beyond their romantic fantasies. The gritty exception is Adele, whose warts-and-all soul is making the kind of generational impact sufficient to position her as an influential artist.
While her dusky alto is neither as worldly nor as raw as Adele’s, Scarlet Furies vocalist Raleigh Holmes’ timbre likewise possesses old-school character — subdued but knowing beyond her twentysomething years. The Scarlet Furies is anchored by her dad, 12-string guitarist/ukulele player Robert Holmes. He called on old bandmates from high school in Whittier when organizing the rootsy ensemble, initially pulled together as a onetime showcase for Raleigh’s singing and writing, which hark back to folk-rock artists of the 1960s and ’70s with instrumentation — six- and 12-string guitars, standup bass, Cajon, mandolin — that complements Raleigh’s expressive tones.
Little detracts from that vocal focal point. Raleigh sometimes strums an autoharp, but onstage she primarily stations herself behind the microphone, swaying with the feeling she channels into singing. Between songs, she banters comfortably with audiences, but is clearly most comfortable when connecting with the drama in her lyrics, like an actress embodying characters. She stretches out with a dreamy reading of Nirvana’s “Heart-Shaped Box” and the lightly swinging jazz of “P.S. I Love You,” but the bulk of Scarlet Furies material is folk-rock with a vaguely Celtic feel. That sound has made them an agreeable choice for festivals, where the Furies have opened for the likes of Leon Russell and the Subdudes, and fans of Shakespeare and murder ballads have responded to the emotional stories sketched out in songs like “Bluegrass Hamlet” and “Young Goodman Brown” (“The chorus sounded trumpets and the blaze it peeled the color from the sky/ And the good beheld the wicked and their faces blurred together in the light/ I cried out against the roaring and the silence it hushed into a sigh”). The band may only be a steppingstone, but Raleigh Holmes is a voice worth noting.
The Scarlet Furies perform at the Coffee Gallery Backstage, 2029 N. Lake Ave., Altadena, at 8 p.m. Friday; $18. Pasadena femme folk band the Merry Wives of Windsor open. For reservations and info, call (626) 798-6236. scarletfuries.com
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT