Over A Cardboard Sea - Self Titled (2009)

From last.fm:


"Over A Cardboard Sea performs popular American songs from the early 20th century."


This was a neat little discover I checked out about a month ago via Pat The Bunny's distro. Over A Cardboard Sea is a cover band that does renditions popular songs from the Vaudeville era. Here's a short description via wikipedia about what Vaudeville is.


"Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill. Types of acts included popular and classical musicians, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, female and male impersonators, acrobats, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and movies. Vaudeville developed from many sources, including the concert saloon, minstrelsy, freak shows, dime museums, and literary burlesque. Called "the heart of American show business," vaudeville was one of the most popular types of entertainment in North America for several decades."


With that being said, Over A Cardboard Sea seems to captivate the old time Vaudeville scene in every which way possible. There is a presence of old school instruments such a accordions, traditional piano, steel string guitar, ukuleles,  kazoos, and one of those wavey sheet of metal machines (not really sure what it's called). The lo-finess of the album seems like it was recorded on a phonograph back in the 20's. s If you're familiar with Vaudeville then you'll instantly nostalgia with familiar jimmies such as Tain't No Sin and It's Only A Paper Moon. What I thought was really interesting about looking back at Vaudeville and this style of music are the innuendos. For instance, in Tain't No Sin some of the are "now if a girl wears x-ray dresses and shows everything she owns, so take off your skin and dance around in your bones" which is pretty much saying that it's not a sin to have sex with a woman who is wearing skimpy clothes because she is pretty much begging for it. I don't think a majority of my viewers will like this but I just thought it was something interesting and different from the usual stuff. So if you're feeling experimental and want to try something knew I highly suggest this.

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