Red Roses and Dead Things: an album review

Disclosure: I game with Seanan and consider her a friend.

Seanan McGuire's new CD (signed #147/300) landed in my Mac's optical drive last night.

My initial reaction after one listen-through: O.M.F.G.W.T.F.B.B.Q.

This album is an exploration of mad science, romance and horror, both real and fictional. From rockers like the (totally!) NC-17 rated "You Get The Tickets" and "Maybe it's Crazy" to the Schoolhouse Rock style tune "The Black Death" (a nice Leslie Fish-esque teaching song) and "Another Mad Science Love Song" a duet with Filk Hall o' Famer Tom Smith, Red Roses and Dead Things delivers. Every song simply shines with Seanan's love of mad science (or is that MAD SCIENCE!), mind-blasting horror, and sweet sweet romance. RR&DT definitely puts the "romance" back in Necromancy!

And all of this just in time for St. Valentine's Day (as in the massacre . . .) for a mere $16 USD.

Musical details such as Seanan's vocals, the arrangements, insturmentals and general production values are much improved over her debut studio album, 2007's Stars Fall Home. On some of the songs on SFH, the insturmentals almost overpowered the vocals at times -- my favorite song from SFH, "Still Catch the Tide," suffered badly from this -- but there was a much better balance on RR&DT. Seanan's strongest musical virtue is her lyrics. Poetic, playful, sensual, evocative and at times downright randy -- Seanan's lyrics are, to paraphrase the words of another friend about cooking, an alchemy of phrase, word and rhyme. The front cover art -- a sexy drawing of Teh Blonde dual-wielding a deer rifle and pump shotgun, ready for action in the a zombie apocalypse and a hot date -- and the illustration on the back are quite nice, but the song list and printing of the lyric booklet need a bit of work. The type on the inside of the lyric booklet is small, and the song list on the inside and back covers are a very low contrast hard to read black-on-brown. Fortunately the song list lyrics to almost all of the songs are available online (thank Loki for text-scaling web browsers!), so this is but a quibble.

On balance, you owe it to yourself to get this CD. Even if you're not not mad about Science!
Or dead things.