Lavender Diamond
Issue #26
The Cavalry of Light (Lavender Diamond Partners)
By Elizabeth Barker
Published: December 1st, 2005 | 2:21pm
Whatever biography you can Google together for Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark reads like myth, or at least like a fantasy life some hyper-imaginative preteen oddball might map out in her lockable diary. She’s toured Russia in a ballet troupe, worked as a magician’s assistant, trained to be an opera singer, and even played Snow White in a PBS movie. But one minute into The Cavalry of Light, the four-song debut by Stark’s L.A.-based “operatic 1930s folk band,” every weird little detail makes sense and you can’t not believe.
Calvary opens with the plunky piano notes and plucky guitar strings of “You Broke My Heart,” Stark’s crystalline voice climbing and chiming out the song title so many times that it ultimately becomes an ecstatic revelation. Like Mama Cass and Karen Carpenter, Stark is one of those rare singers charmed with an otherworldly ability to transmit true joy, making ‘sad’ sound like ‘happy’ until you eventually forget there was ever a difference between the two. When the band (featuring Young People’s Jeff Rosenberg on guitar, WACO’s Steve Gregoropoulos on keyboards, and illustrator Ron Rege, Jr. on drums) breaks into a Fairport Convention-style sing-along about “the kind of love that lasts forever” on “In Heaven There is No Heat,” you’re sure you’ve heard that exact lyric before in some wretchedly sincere piece of lite-and-easy fluff. But here, it’s magically transformed by Stark’s fairy tale-pure heart, and you can’t not believe.
Comments
Please login to be able to comment on this article.
more