Gram Rabbit

There’s something decidedly disturbing about Gram Rabbit’s Music To Start A Cult To. Filled with eerie melodies and talk of Jesus and the devil, cowboys, aliens and murder, the songs on the album are given an added depth by the spookily seductive voice of Jesika von Rabbit. She sounds like the kind of woman you always meet in horror films, right after some poor sap realizes that he took a wrong turn fifteen miles back. He’ll have to spend the night at the hotel where some scary but flirtatious woman works. And although he’s a little weirded out, our poor sap doesn’t see a problem. At least not until the devilish angel comes knocking at three a.m. with a chainsaw and... well, you know the rest.

In conversation, neither von Rabbit nor her partner in songwriting, Todd Rutherford, sound like people you need to be frightened of, but you never lose the sense, even then, that the eerie, isolative elements of the outfit’s songs are real. Take a listen to “Devil’s Playground,” or “Cowboy-Up,” and you can feel the slap of cool desert air in your bones. Your heart slows, then quickens and a strange, metallic taste momentarily fills your mouth.

It’s creepy and cool stuff from a band (which also features Travis Cline) bornin the high desert town of Joshua Tree, California, back when von Rabbit and Rutherford barely knew each other. They’d come out there to work on a project that was doomed from right around the word go.

“ It was really bad and it was really sad and I hated it,” von Rabbit says. “I’d been in bands before that were much better than what I was doing at themoment and I didn’t really know what was going on. I was singing and playing bass mostly. It was going kinda crappy.”