Cutthroat Standards & Black Pop

Combining sonic and sartorial elements from Kate Bush, Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Phantom of the Opera, the second record from Abby Travis is a very strange yet intriguing mishmash of pop and Victorian goth maneuvers. Cutthroat Standards & Black Pop is a fitting title for this alternately pretentious and sincere collection, which stylistically can only be called kitsch'n sink. Travis bounds from such show-tune numbers as "So Far Away" to a bit of Brecht/Weill-meets-Franziskaner madness on "Have I Got a Deal for You" to a loungy bossa nova groove on "Sunday Is the Day for Love." Like Elton John on his mid-'70s epics, Travis uses the CD canvas to prove her facility in multiple genres; a chanteuse for all seasons. Fortunately, she has the songwriting chops and malleable voice to do it; unfortunately, she goes to extremes in her steering, weighing down her songs with arrangements and deliveries excessively Elizabethan and thickly maudlin. The tiresome goth show-tune dramatics of "October" ("embrace the naked moon of Halloween") show Travis' bad side — allowing her interest in cultivating an image to prevail over making sure the songs hold up as songs, first and foremost. For every cute bon mot (her reasoning on "Sometimes I Wish I Had a Gun" is, simply enough, "'cuz competition isn't fun"), there's a lapse into juvenile poetry, rendering Cutthroat Standards & Black Pop a flawed if unique listen.