San Francisco-based Terese Taylor is a floating rib of sorts - her idiosyncratic style and sound isn't attached to the flimflam sternum of the music industry. On her second record, The Cryingness of Your Crying When You Cry (Bombsniffing Dog Records), she loosens her oyster clutch to share seven darkly-lacquered, private grains of post-punk-alternative-folk-rock. While her sophomore effort lives in the same world as her 1999 release, Th Clothes We Wore Before We Were Married, it exudes more of an intimate glimpse into the black heaviness that Taylor and drummer Rob Johnson are known for. The Cryingness was recorded in two five-hour sessions by student engineers in San Francisco, mixed by Matt Boudreau (mattboudreau.com) and mastered by Michael Romanowski (paulstubblebine.com). The sessions were named Impounded because Charlie, the horn player got arrested on the way to the studio, and Moustache because everyone wore stick-ons to keep themselves playfully entertained. Johnson, who says he's from Massatucky (Colrain, MA) is musically fueled by his pleasant memories of his father shooting things with BB guns, and the unsinkable influence of his Harley For Jesus kind of mother. Hailing from Buffalo, NY, where Genessee Cream Ale flows from every spigot, Taylor's melancholic stories of doom, gloom, old familiar rage and hope were come by honestly. She's a back-porch storyteller that cleverly leaves colossal gaps open to interpretation - as in one of her most lyrically jarring and talked about songs, "Goats for Daddy": "Billy mountain goat/Red ribbon 'round his neck/A present for my dad/ I carry him on my back/I follow it the best/Because I'm the best he's ever had." The album is a lyrically potent mesh of anomalous feedback molded with thick, syncopated drumbeats, which are particularly evident in "Reluctantly", and "Your Hand" - a song Taylor wrote about a stalker who lived below her in New Mexico, but it somehow was twisted into the closest she says she's ever gotten to a love song. Her broad vocal range is eerily addictive and adaptive as she effortlessly switches gears from low and perfectly offbeat in "Sweet" to complete falsetto in one of the records best, "Ghost", which oozes a mood comparable to sitting in a dingy restaurant with roof funk dripping down onto a breakfast you didn't want in the first place. With the exception of "Candy" (a self-proclaimed "fuck you to radio ready pop nuggets"), all the songs are seemingly the resultant strain and chafing of the wax plug that safeguards the contents of brilliant paper skull. FIRST REVIEW of this CD "The Cryingness of Your Crying When You Cry": "I listened to your CD as soon as I had a 1 AM opportunity -- when it's quiet and there are nointerruptions -- and was totally captivated by your songwriting. There are some particularly beautiful simple melodies which are completely unpredictable, kind of breathtaking actually and surprising--definitely **inspired**! Some moments are positively just beautiful! Beauty is its own justification for being, right?! I really like the spare, minimalist lyrics -- as well as the high lonesome sound modern folk music 'arrangements' (very good arrangements, i might add) -- which can evoke vast vistas of alienated American landscape, as though written by a weary, much-too-long-on-the-road hitchhiker. Those first 4 songs evoke a David Lynch movie emotionality, "Goats for Daddy," "Sweet," "Reluctantly." "Ghost" is possibly the most haunting; whenever I hear something I couldn't possibly have dreamed up in a thousand years of trying, I think, "Wow, this person must be a genius! **HOW** could they have ever come up with that?" The songs on your CD sound "authentic"--that is, to my ear very original and more importantly, tapping down into a deep reservoir of pain and uncertainty and fractured memories. The songs are beautiful (there's that word again) **transfigurations**-- they take a lifetime of contradictory experience and what remains are crystal-pure distillations...poetry, in which a few words evoke so much feeling. Great music! Really, it can't get much better than that! ...the title of your CD is very funny, in a very dark way -- it made me laugh out loud, with its hyperbolic absurdity, in the same way that death itself is hyperbolically absurd --" -V.Vale, June, 2003, RE/Search magazine & Search & Destroy Zine (http://www.researchpubs.org)

"Terese Taylor can veer from lonely backwoods laments to precise, grinding Mission Of Burma-like instrumentals and back. Her music is intuitive and mysterious, filled with personal in-jokes and painful memories, a puzzle that is meant to be felt and experienced, not solved. At times, her songs remind me of Neil Young in his youth, writing lyrics in his sick bed while suffering from a high fever and coming up with stuff that was troubling and moving, but impossible to understand on a literal level, even by himself. The details in her songs tend to be small, but you can feel powerful, unspoken undercurrents beneath the prosaic details of songs that are ostensibly about such things as watching a refrigerator defrost or washing a puppy's feet. You get a clear picture of her personality from her music: a strong yet hyper-sensitive character who's been through some serious struggle and come out of it looking at the world with wry humor and amazement. Her voice is an expressive moan, her guitar playing is slashing, gut-level stuff on the rockier tracks and woozy, cracked shards of country-western on the slower ones. (Once again, the Neil Young parallels apply.) She deserves to be huge." JNeo Marvin, Pazz & Jop Poll for Village Voice "She categorizes her music as "Folk", but donīt expect to hear strumming on an acoustic guitar and mandolins and violins all day long. This body of work is a fuzzed out rocking jaunt into the backyards and back woods that is at times dark and beautiful. Tereseīs voice can be delicate enought to convey loss, longing and hurt, but never do you get the sense that it overwhelms. In fact these songs are a testiment to someone who survived." -DJ Nylon, PirateKat Radio