Published on Sep 12, 2000
Christine Ohlman has led an interesting life as a musician, with
her most public success coming as the vocalist for the house band
of television’s
Saturday Night Live. One would think that Ohlman and her
band Rebel Montez would be primed for success in whatever musical
style would come her way.
Her latest disc
Wicked Time, instead, shows a vocalist and songwriter who is
stylistically sound, but otherwose sounds unmotivated towards
anything past bar band status. Of course, Ohlman is hardly a bar
band artist… but if I didn’t know her history, I’d have expected
them to be playing one of the local watering holes.
Ohlman and her band – guitarist Eric Fletcher, bassist Michael
Colbath and drummer Larry Donahue – are decent enough musicians,
something which is evident throughout the course of
Wicked Time. If only the band sounded like they were excited
about the music they were performing. What the listener is
presented with, in essence, is a leisurely walk through the park –
not something you want to hear when you expect this group to burn
the barn down at every turn.
At times,
Wicked Time has promise, such as on their cover of The
Rolling Stones’s “Heart Of Stone” or the battered-woman-revenge
song “Longtime Woman,” a song which shows off the r&b-based
roots of the band. But these moments are few and far between.
You’d expect Ohlman to be more excited about her own music,
wouldn’t you? Yet she seems to coast through performances such as
“When I Work My Thang On You,” “One More Thrill,” “Heaven Or Hell”
and “Wicked Time”. Yet you can’t call any of these performances bad
by any stretch of the word. They’re musically solid, and Ohlman is
a decent songwriter. But her impressive musical resume is just not
enough to carry this album. You need to put some drive behind it –
and
Wicked Time is lacking this drive.
Wicked Time is an album of decent songs delivered
half-heartedly, and is recommended only for diehard fans of
Ohlman’s or of r&b-laced rock. Otherwise, the reaction you may
have to this disc isn’t “wicked”… it may be “yawn”.