Review: The Sound Within Eisenberg & Stern
Kayla Eisenberg (vocals) and Marguerite Stern (guitar and vocals) are “Carol” and “Julie”, renowned vocal coaches and self-styled “gurus of the throat”, treating lucky audiences to a showcase of the “top acts” they’ve worked with.
These range from Savvy and Jacqui, super-intense hippy chicks stalking an ex-lover’s door with songs and getting arrested; the Plain White Jeans, with an obnoxious Brit-pop boy band schtick (chart position 197 with “Don't Talk to Me When Your Shit Hits the Fan”); and the cruddy, portentous 60s folk-rocker minnows, the Almond Brothers.
The pair drop frequent references to their one claim to show biz success, their 1982 epic psychodrama “The Raincoat”, starring no stars.
But it’s musical song they love, and we’re urged to join in vocal gymnastics exercises such as: “Red leather, yellow leather, vegan leather, Al Pacino” (it scans, so what the hey? “Gi-na Lolo-bridgi-da, bea-utiful-film-star” was my singing teacher’s favourite practice for limbering up the lips.)
Predictably bitchy, the New Yorkers engage in upstaging skirmishes: “sometimes the ego fogs the lens!!” warns Carol when Julie gets too dominant; then another vocal exercise: “we-are-in-a-law-suit-with-Hil-ary-Duff”. The grotesque costumes and hammy comedy acting remind me of Ab-Fab, despite me managing to avoid watching more than a few seconds of it. Surely it wasn't really that bad?
Because these two are VERY bad – but deliberately so. Ploughing the rich comedic groove of the hapless moron everyone really loves (Alan Partridge, David Brent) the performers make us squirm with delight at their musical atrocities and remind us how rubbish an awful lot of mainstream pop is now. They caterwaul just like all those Reading Festival women like Charli XCX and Skye Newman, and belt out the sexual groaning that passes for 90 per cent of female AOR nowadays.
I enjoyed their energy and commitment, but the material was thin, and I wondered how many Marx Bros or Laurel and Hardy films they’d ever watched. But I still plan to rent the Major Motion Picture: The Raincoat (on VHS, of course).
3 stars