Melora Creager (photo Seth Rogovoy)
(HUDSON, N.Y.) – Melora Creager’s ever-evolving indie-rock cello band Rasputina returns to its hometown rock venue Club Helsinki Hudson on Thursday, October 15, at 8pm, as part of its “Unknown” tour, so named for the latest album of original material by the group, its first in six years.
The current tour reunites Creager with Carpella Parvo, one of the group’s original cellists from the mid-1990s, who has been on hiatus largely due to a crippling case of carpal tunnel syndrome, for which she has finally found relief. The current tour also marks the first time Rasputina is touring with Luis Mojica, a keyboardist and beatboxing vocalist also of the Hudson Valley.
Since 1991, singer-songwriter and cellist Melora Creager – who calls Hudson home — has been exploring the affinities among modern rock, cello, and Victorian folk with Rasputina. Her original songs connect the dots between Renaissance madrigals and Nirvana-like grunge-rock. In fact, Creager toured as a cellist with Nirvana on the group’s final European tour.
Originally formed as a female cello-rock trio, Rasputina – which recorded several albums for Columbia Records in the 1990s – has evolved over the years at the same time that hipster musical trends have caught up with Creager’s idiosyncratic creativity that anticipated styles including freak-folk, Modern Victorian and Steampunk. Creager’s fascination with history and legend has led her to explore medical curiosities, climate change, Auschwitz and 16th-century Catholicism in song.
Employing elaborate costuming spanning a number of historical periods, Rasputina brings marginalized historical female figures and stories to light in the pop form, using archetypal characters such as Indian princesses, Hawaiian handmaidens and Medieval queens.
Over the years, Rasputina has performed/recorded with Marilyn Manson, Porno for Pyros, Cheap Trick, Goo Goo Dolls and many others.
Rasputina released “Unknown” last April. The record is a concept album exploring Melora Creager’s trauma after her computer was hacked into. The album is only available on CD from the band’s website so, as Creager states, “conceptually… anyone who purchases it is known to me.” The entire album was recorded solo by Creager in three weeks.
For reservations in The Restaurant or in the club call 518.828.4800.