CD review: Carolyn Mark and NQ Arbuckle, Let’s Just Stay Here (Mint Records) and “Terrible Hostess: Recipes for Disaster, Volume II, Road-Tested by Carolyn Mark”

By Rachel Heisler

Carolyn Mark has a flair for the dramatic, and it’s this flair that makes her music so damn fun to slosh around in. Her musical base is a kind of light, twangified country, but she expands it to include raunchy twists and mysterious turns. You jump into a song thinking you know what’s coming, only to be flicked off course when you least expect it. It’s difficult enough to keep up with the wicked little nymh when it’s just her, but Let’s Just Stay Here is doubly tricky to track because it is a collaboration with musician NQ Arbuckle, a playful chap in his own right.

Having worked together in 2005 on the track “Fireworks” (recorded for Mark’s Just Married: An Album of Duets), the pair was able to find a perfect working relationship on this disk. Whether harmonizing or effortlessly tossing lines back and forth on songs like Mark’s “Itchy Feet”, or giving each other the necessary control to guide and shape the songs that are less duets and more like songs that would normally be on a strictly solo album (I.e. Mark’s slightly sinister-sounding “All time Low”, or the fiesty ”Canada Day Off/Toronto” or Arbuckle’s easier-going “Saskatoon Tonight”), Mark and Arbuckle prove there’s no “I” in TEAM.

Both have a way of subtly throwing in jolting lines like “Girlfriend you’re lighting your cigarette from the wrong end again and again” (on Arbuckle’s otherwise clear-cut bluegrass track, “When I Come Back”), that take the songs in an unexpected darker direction, without making them dark as a whole. It’s just one of the traits that take makes it apparent that these are not just songwriters, they are wordsmiths. It’s their lyrical inhabitions that put them on a higher playing field than others in their profession.

Mark and Arbuckle have the existential abiltiy to mind-meld and become “one”, an ability that is necessary when two individuals come together to create something singular. They have achieved this and more on Let’s Just Stay Here.

For more information, visit www.mintrecs.com.

NOTE: BEYOND THE MUSIC

Mark’s quirkiness isn’t portrayed in the musical medium alone these days. No, her talents have spread into the cookbook arena, with the release of “Terrible Hostess: Recipes for Disaster, Volume II, Road-Tested by Carolyn Mark”.

“I don’t promise to reveal the secret of the universe,” Mark writes. “ … but maybe this collection, these collected recipes, might serve to shed a little light on some of the mysteries of the kitchen or, if nothing else, provide a little inspiration if you’re lacking.”  And inspiration should be found easily in recipes like She-Devil Soup, Christ on a Cracker and Final Fantasy Celery Soup. Many recipes are conveniently paired with appropriate wines, and happily, music. Example: Mason Street (circa 1994) Green Tortellini is paired with 1 silo of Gato Negro and The Breeders, Jonathan Richmond, Pavement and Beastie Boys.

Ah, Carolyn, is there any stone you haven’t unturned?