sabrina chap: oompa!

The admirable thing about vaudeville is that it really can’t be done half-heartedly. It’s a style that requires a lotta shoulder-shimmy and real fire in the belly. If you can’t channel that awesome power of entertainment, the spotlight will drift away quicker than the tip of a hat. A good thing, then, that Sabrina Chap has this ability by the barrel. The ragtime swinger has been a classical pianist since the age of five, and though Oompa! has a distinctively Dixieland style, her debut album Bedroom Sessions was a lo-fi, guitar-based affair inspired by that great matriarch of acoustic jams, Ani DiFranco. Mastering Scott Joplin’s ‘Maple Leaf Rag’, however, lured her back onto the ivories and set the rich, jazzy tone of this glorious follow-up.

Clearly not afraid of hard graft, Chap has toured heavily throughout Europe (she’s a respected veteran of Ladyfests all over the continent) and can boast an intimate familiarity with most of the small bars and clubs in both New York and Chicago. Not only that, she’s edited and published the Lambda-nominated book Live Through This – On Creativity & Destruction, a collection of essays from notorious figures such as Nan Goldin, bell hooks and Christy C Road. It’s a theme that continues rather neatly from tome to tune with the wild upright bass twang and dizzy trumpets of Oompa!’s blinding opener, ‘Blueprint For Destruction’.

With her feminist polemic firmly heart-on-sleeve in nature, it’s no surprise that there’s a bold, queer-ish, empowered narrative running through Oompa!’s ragtime antics. ‘Never Been A Bad Girl’ teams impeccably comedic timing with a hip-swish of good-girl-gone-bad theatrics, while the piping bluegrass violin of ‘Carolina’ (which comes courtesy of Chap’s fellow feminist editor, Melanie We Don’t Need Another Wave Berger) works things up to dizzy heights of thigh-slapping fun. Whether it’s tequila and one night stands with garter-donning women or coffee and the welcome-home tingle of a familiar city, Chap sings songs of life lived in full colour.

The inventive time signatures on each of the album’s eleven acts are magnificent, with touches of burlesque fizzing up proceedings sweetly. From the lazy, big band pace of ‘Failed Waitress / Failed Astronaught’ to the uptempo, toe-tappin’ ‘Illinois’, Oompa! goes down like a perfectly mixed tipple with laughter and tears poured out in equal measures. ‘Nobody Home To Sing The Blues’ sets drawn-out angst against the melancholy trumpet and nouveau jazz brush taps of ‘Never Again’, while the funny, colloquial tourist-bashing dished out on ‘Ze Paris Song’ is balanced by the pathos and slippery, off-kilter bar piano of ‘Idiom’.

The fishnets and cigarettes that streak through Chap’s tales and travels are enjoyably bawdy, though ‘Little White Lie’ shows the performer can do heartfelt sentiment with equal, if suitably restrained gusto. Despite its bittersweet shades, Oompa! never really falters along its boldly convivial path, revelling in music born from performance. Though any UK dates have yet to be announced, Chap has plans for a tour that will see her scores acted out with the help of a travelling circus sideshow including “a fire-eater, burlesque performer, magician and herself as a one-woman band”. Better get your gladrags ready.

[ERT; May 18, 2010]

Written by: Charlotte Richardson Andrews

Tags: oompa!, sabrina chap

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 16th, 2010 at 12:42 pm and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.