It’s Witchcraft
Gothic glamour puss puts you under her spell with eerie purr
By Sam Hurwitt

Chanteuse Jill Tracy will claw her way into your heart.

One must be careful of Jill Tracy. The pale and shadowy chanteuse quickly draws you in with her noirish compositions; her songs are eerie and enticing, clever and clawing, and replete with gothic glamour. The San Francisco-based New York émigré likes her fare dark and bloody, sprinkled with cabaret charm, old-time chamber ragtime chops and an almost overpowering sense of seductive gloom. Abetted by her equally elegant poetry and piano, her voice is a sultry moan, a breathy purr, a throaty siren’s call. It glistens and yawns before you, like an abyss or a bear trap.

The fearsome femme fatale has been elegantly immortalized on her aptly named recent release, Diabolical Streak, a follow-up to her 1995 live solo debut Quintessentially Unreal, this time with creepy-crawly back-up from her Malcontent Orchestra. It’s a dark delight from start to finish, with a spine-tingling signature sound that distinct and consistent without becoming monotonous, novel without becoming merely a novelty.

The disc opens in a haunting minor key, tinkling into the upbeat but relentlessly sinister cabaret come-on "Evil Night Together"-Daniel Baer’s funereal violin warning of the powerful undertow half hidden by Tracy’s ragtime piano and Alexander Kort’s steady double bass. When Tracy purrs, "Let’s wile away the hours, let’s spend an evil night together," it gives you chills-both of aesthetic appreciation and as if someone walked over your grave.

Baer’s mournful violin elegantly opens the malignant aperitif "The Fine Art of Poisoning," all atmosphere and cleverness. Tracy’s cautionary litany "Pulling Your Insides Out" is so dreamy as to be nearly soporific, but the theatrical "Extraordinary" is just that: She moans in mannered and crisp Anglicized enunciation, "I’ve searched the holy books and I’ve dog-eared every page/ I’ve stolen secrets from the sorcerer’s own sage/ Although a connoisseur of fine legerdemain/ I’ve just one word for you/ Extraordinary." Indeed.

Over Baer’s haunting violin and Nadine Whitfield’s moaning bassoon in "the Proof"- a wistful catalog of violent death in the spirit (if not the meter) of Edward Gorey-Tracy languorously stretches the word "I" into three syllables when she sighs, "I want to believe in something." The opening of "Just the Other Side of Pain" sounds a bit like a classical pianist performing "While My Guitar Gently Weeps" at a solo recital, but Tracy’s spellbinding voice swoops in (along with the violin) to make the tune- as well as the listener- her own.

One part blues, one part ragtime and three parts witchcraft, one can’t help but chill to the playfully macabre and steamy graveyard rhapsody "You Leave Me Cold." And the romantic ragtime delight "Doomsday Serenade" gives a teasing glimpse of what a jolly Armageddon it’ll be: "We’ll meet again my dear on Doomsday," Tracy breathes. "A showerfall of frogs and toads/ But as bleak as it may be/ Apocalyptic reverie/ Hand in hand we’ll tiptoe/ over carcasses and bones."

The nine-minute title track that closes the album is almost unrelenting in its threnodial darkness, bedecked by spooky sawing violin, steady classical piano and playful passages that serve only to plunge you deeper into the all-encompassing, unnervingly seductive gloom. As the song fades out, it’s replaced by a ghostly distorted waltz as though played on a crumbling carousel. It adds resonance to Tracy’s deft use of archaisms and affinity for things dusty and arcane, drawing attention both to her music’s roots in another time and to its timeless attraction.