Universal Hall Pass - Mercury

Timeliness? Me? Nah... According to iTunes, this was released in November 2004, but I don't think I dug it out of the KTCU reject box until October or November of 2005. It's been sitting on my desk since then, waiting patiently, and occasionally whispering, "Listen to me." But there are a few CDs sitting on my desk, all saying the same thing, so it took me a while to get to this one...

I pulled this one out of the reject box because the promo sticker read "RIYL: Bjork, Portishead, Lamb." Whoever wrote that hit me right where I live, especially on the Bjork and Portishead references. But now that I've listened to it, I think someone was just kind of lazy, and thought, "Who do I compare Universal Hall Pass to? Let's see... Female vocals and occasional electronic sounds... Uh, oh yeah, Bjork! And maybe Portishead. Oh, and let me get a little bit of a hipster reference in there by name-dropping Lamb. Yeah, that's the ticket!" Yeah, there are occasional elements of those three artists in here, but Universal Hall Pass takes a variety of sounds and combines them quite nicely.

When I popped this CD in the player, I was surprised when (what sounded like) Casiotone drumbeats started coming out of the speakers, and a chirpy voice sings:

Son of a bitch
Don't sabotage everything that moves forward

The music then fills out with more modern and full sounds for the chorus. But I have to say I was hooked from the beginning... Melissa Kaplan, the brains behind Universal Hall Pass, displays plenty of attitude in her vocal delivery, and the music is a fun blend of different styles.

"Dragonfly" starts pretty mellow, but soons hits a funky stride that evolves into some brief drum & bass sections. "Katrina Josephina" is quite striking, with layers of vocals all provided by Kaplan.

But my favorite track on the CD is "Six-Step Dragon". Kaplan does a fantastic job of combining Asian-influenced sounds with a dancey-feeling backing track. Sometimes on these combinations of world and dance musics, it feels really forced and awkward. In this case, they complement each other nicely to create an amazing piece of music.

"Outro" seems to have a bit of a tribute to "The Girl from Impanema," or else I'm really reading too much into it... But it sounds like it's got some of the same elements to me...

In digging around the web a bit, this is Kaplan's first solo album, but she was in a band called Splashdown. I'm not familar with them, but I'll be doing some digging after hearing this incredible CD.

Kaplan has some mp3 downloads available from the Universal Hall Pass site: "Dragonfly" and "Misdirected". "Misdirected is my favorite of the two, but give it some time -- it takes a moment to catch your ear... Mercury is available from the Sneaky Records site, and also from iTunes.