Part the Fifth: Wherein Our Hero Is Witness To The Cult of Rasputina

6:00pm on a boring Sunday evening. Eating alone in the cafeteria. No one around. Nothing to do.
And then Wright happens. A scrawny punk-geek who joins my table along with mutual friend, Collin. He jabbers in a way that seems at once excited and slightly nervous. We talk and he mentions that he and some friends proposed a show idea to Adult Swim. (Its called ‘Olympus Burger’, keep a lookout).
I’m about to excuse myself when he lets it drop: Rasputina is playing in Ithaca at 8:00pm and the tickets are $12! After questioning him incredulously and being turned down for a ride, I begin my frantic search for anyone with a car and a pair of ears.
One borrowed bike and 2 hours later, I’m sitting in a junky looking bar waiting for Rasputina and observing the many characters which come to see them. Amongst the oddities:
-A few girls in corset dresses including a eccentric pink-haired perky goth who worked the bar and a small haughty girl in white with an ermine slung over her shoulder
-A fellow in Victorian bankteller’s outfit with a penchant for journalism. (At one point he got the camera so close to Melora that she scolded him)
-A balding goth guy with tattered clothes. Very creepy…..
-Many tattooed and pierced individuals of every variety

The show was excellent. The electric cellos roared and whined and sang as they moved through songs. The depth of the cellos’ sound can be heard in all the different synthesized sounds: when emulating an electric guitar, the cello has a powerful grind that even the real thing can’t achieve. And when Melora played, it was as if she were angrily thrashing the bow against the strings, yet somehow the music poured out perfectly in time and tune.
Rasputina’s sound is entirely singular. The combination of two cellos, a drum set (which includes tympanis) and the ghostly voices of the two women creates a surreal goth-metal barrage of sound. One must hear to understand.
Melora was quite a spectacle (as always). She was decked in an intricate white dress with huge white flowers wreathing her hair. She keeps an utterly deadpan face as she pushes through a dark, pounding song about being killed by werewolves, waltzes through a mockingly happy song about being addicted to TV-reality and sings the tale of a girl trying to avoid death with astrology. Between songs, the bizarrities flow from her lips like a madwoman: She rambles about hidden information in her songs incriminating the Bush administration for 9/11; about the bonding rituals of suicide bombers in North Wales; about the mayor of Ithaca being convicted of being a werewolf a year from now; about the national parks being closed after chipmunks with the Black Plague are found across the US.
In total: highly entertaining and unforgettable. Worth every ounce of sweat spent as I walked the bike back up the hill to the college, merrily humming ‘Transylvanian Concubine’.