Rani Arbo & daisy mayhem | San Francisco Guardian Review

San Francisco Guardian Review — Big Old Life

In 1991, nine years before “O Brother, Where Art Thou” made the world safe for old-time acoustic music, and about a dozen years before groups like the Duhks and the Mammals added their youthful gloss of hipness to a burgeoning movement, another animal-kingdom ensemble, Salamander Crossing, out of Northampton, Mass., got the jump on the whole string-band revival thing with a folk- and rock-influenced hybrid it called “amphibious bluegrass.”

Although that band gave up the ghost in 1999, its lead singer and fiddler, Rani Arbo, immediately formed a new quartet, Daisy Mayhem, which continues to bring freshness and excitement to a genre that could easily succumb to terminal trendiness.

“I laugh about it,” Arbo said by phone from her Vermont home, “because when Salamander did a showcase at IBMA (the International Bluegrass Music Association convention) in 1995, we got comment slips that said, ‘This band needs to decide if it’s a bluegrass band or a folk band,’ and ‘It ain’t bluegrass, but it beats the hell out of country.’ We took all the negative comments we got as compliments.”

Daisy Mayhem has just released its third album, “Big Old Life” (Signature Sounds), which reaffirms the harmony-singing group — with guitarist Anand Nayak, bassist and banjo player Andrew Kinsey and percussionist Scott Kessel (who plays the Drumship Enterprise — a drum set made up of a cardboard box, cat food cans, a Danish butter cookie tin and a suitcase) — as one of the most song- and arrangement-oriented bands in a field overgrown with pyrotechnic, jam- and solo-conscious virtuosos. The new disc is packed with songs that ponder, probe and party around big issues that have arisen for the band members during the four years since their last album, including the birth of Arbo and Kessel’s son, Quinn, and Arbo’s successful battle with stage II breast cancer.

The CD’s bookend tracks, Sean Staples’ “Joy Comes Back” and Daisy May Erlewine’s “Shine On,” are songs the band heard performed at festivals. In between are three philosophical Arbo originals (“Roses,” “Hole in Heaven” and the title tune), Jim McGuinness’ slow-moving “Thief,” a jaunty treatment of Bob Dylan’s “Farewell, Angelina” and Leonard Cohen’s consoling “Heart With No Companion.”

“We’ve always gone for songs that can be more than one story, depending on who’s listening to them,” Arbo said. “We heard ‘Joy Comes Back’ just before I was diagnosed, and it related perfectly to my cancer, but it could relate to any universal human experience, like a divorce or death, because they’re not simple experiences. But it’s funny how, going for all these complex universal-type songs, we’ve sort of ignored the most complex universal emotion of all, which is romantic love. There’s not a love song on the record — not one, and I didn’t realize that until my mother heard the record and said to me, ‘You should be singing more love songs.’ “

San Francisco Guardian Review — Big Old Life

- Derk Richardson, San Francisco Guardian, July 2007