Rainer Maria Poor Rainer Maria Rilke. As a child, he was dressed as a girl by his mama and made to answer to the name Sophia; he died, still relatively young, at age 51, after being pricked by a thorn.
Now the German poet must suffer the indignity of having his name appropriated by Rainer Maria, the most painfully earnest emo band to come along since Dashboard Confessional. Rainer Maria -- former name Ezra Pound -- sets poetry-workshop lyrics to emo's trademark soft-loud dynamics. Depending on your tolerance for unflinching sincerity, the results are either A) moving and cathartic or B) more affected than Madonna's English accent.
Friday at the Black Cat, Rainer Maria played to a crowd belonging to category A, the category B people having fled the District in accordance with Daniel Defoe's dictum that the best preparation for the plague is to run away from it.
You can't accuse Rainer Maria of lacking punch. On songs such as "CT Catholic," "Mystery and Misery" and "Breakfast of Champions," drummer William Kuehn and bassist Caithlin De Marrais plowed formidable furrows for the hyper Kyle Fischer -- who darted about the stage like a politician ducking a subpoena -- to fill with his frenzied guitar. But if the ground was fertile, De Marrais' vocals are a rainless sky; stunning, yes, but fatally arid. They don't exactly radiate humor, either, though humor would seem to be a prerequisite for uttering such Monty Python-worthy lines as, "No one defies artificial light." Right. And nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition, either.
-- Mike Little
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A49500-2003Oct5.html
