Neither Deep nor Deprived - Female LA Rockstress is Back To Her Safe Tricks

Consider the cover photo of Killola’s debut album Louder, Louder! as it would have looked to you in 2006.  The three nondescript scruffy dudes seen in profile—who are they?  Theatre students?  Borders employees?  They are in fact guitarist Mike Ball, bassist Johnny Dunn, and drummer Dan Grody, but how were you supposed to know?  Only the pretty brunette in the loud and—gulp!—low-cut shirt is obviously a rock star.  She’s the only one facing forward, and she’s the only one flipping anybody off.

Lisa Rieffel is blonde these days, but Killola is still her band, and I Am the Messer, the second album from L.A.’s prog-pop darlings, is her show.  In the pockets of musical climax where other bands would stuff a guitar solo or a succession of drum fills, Killola stuffs Rieffel, or a choir of layered Rieffels; whenever a big rock moment is needed, she’s the one who steps forward.  She gets your attention—but does she reward it?

A lot is riding on Rieffel’s singing voice, and this, like the oboe, is a strange and exasperating instrument.  Whether you like it will be a matter of taste.  Phonetically it is impossible to locate in the English-speaking world.  She will slip without warning into a faux-Cockney accent, doing a sort of punky Eliza Doolittle.  (“Tonight we’re gonna celebrite! / We’re gonna set the record strite!” goes an un-American line of “10,000 Pound Ego.”) Or she will release her inner valley girl, as she does to set the scene—“It was 1984 / and vi-dee-yoooooh-weh just killed my ray-dee-yoooooh-weh”—in “All of My Idols Are Dead.”  Tonally it is a mixture of Pat Benatar, Melissa Etheridge, and Smurfette, but with the relative proportions of the ingredients constantly varying: sweet and sighing one moment, poisonously bitchy the next.  The touchstone for such multiple-personality vocalizing is Ani DiFranco, who can never attack so much as a two-bar phrase without a full battery of hisses, growls, sighs, whispers, coos, moans, and bellows.

As I said, it’s a matter of taste.  To me, Rieffel’s singing, like DiFranco’s, tastes a little hammy.  But (and this is where the DiFranco comparisons end) Rieffel never, ever sermonizes and never goes out of her depth.  Killola keeps faith with party rock, and our hostess is the same old bird-flipper.  She’s still got the sense of humor of a cheap T-shirt.  I’ll never regret hearing a country ballad, sung with breathless yearning, entitled “You Can’t See Me Because I’m a Stalker.”  Nor will you, nor your wallet.  The entire album is available as a free download from Killola’s website.

Bill Porter