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***Paula Frazer is the former lead vocalist of the critically acclaimed Bay Area band Tarnation. Tarnation's releases on Warner/Reprise and 4AD showed Paula to be a singing/songwriting force to be reckoned with - her rich voice radiates beauty. Occupying the space between Patsy Cline and the Cocteau Twins, Paula takes her country-infused influences to wonderfully dark extremes. Some have called her music "country gothic" but Birdman's David Katznelson just calls it excellent. Indoor Universe is Paula's first solo effort and it is unquestionably her finest work to date. Her heavenly voice has never sounded better and the dreamy expansiveness of her music never more vibrant. Paula Frazer grew up in Sautee Nacoochee, Georgia, and Eureka Springs, Arkansas, singing in the church choir where her father was minister and her mother played piano (it was her mother who taught Paula piano, bought her first guitar when she was nine years old, and introduced her to the music of Billie Holiday, Patsy Cline, George Gershwin, Roy Orbison and the pop music of the '60s and '70s, all of which have remained big influences on her singing and songwriting). As a teenager, Paula sang with jazz groups in Arkansas, performing standards and some of her own songs. She moved to San Francisco in 1981 and since then has sung, played bass and guitar with various local bands such as Frightwig, Pleasant Day, Trial, Cloiter, Virginia Dare, and an Eastern European women's choir in Berkeley called Savina which performed mostly Bulgarian choir songs at community centers and churches. Paula Frazer's voice swoops like a barn swallow on the last day of fall, riding hot currents for the pleasure of swooping and dipping, and not altogether concerned with destination. Hers is a beautiful voice, pure and limber. . . [Her] country phrasing is much like jazz, but no less effective for that. The effect is a trifle like an imaginary melding of Joni Mitchell with k.d. lang. |
