Carol Bui

May 2006

Review by Shawn M. Haney, The Daily Copper

In her debut offering, Carol Bui sticks to a formula of dissonance, passion, dark wit and crafty songwriting to provide heavy, charging rock numbers, delivering track after track with hurricane –like force. “Hell Banknotes� opens up This is How I Recover with a subtle and soft first verse, only to leap and branch out into an intense chorus, a climax aided by a gifted backing band. With a voice like an angel – sounding almost opera-trained - Bui reveals her darker side, fully realizing the impact she can create on stage by shifting the mood on the song to full-fledged dissonant rock. Certainly carving out her niche, Bui blends her melodies with balanced, intelligent narratives. Her songs buzz with energy, yet the pace of the record is relaxed, breathing easily from one song to the next. You can really feel softness in the last track, a highlight, “The Beauty Myth,� only to be surprised, filled with awe over her raspy, hellish vocal screams. When comparing Bui to other songwriters of her genre, one need only look to those of Buckley or bands like Victory at Sea to find them. There is even a hint of Egyptian tonalities in the song “I Don’t Call Him By Name,� a breath of fresh air away from usual college radio spins. - Copper Press

May 2006

Review by Whitney Strub

This grim little gem bears a 2004 copyright and an ostensible February 2006 release date, implying a potentially dramatic behind-the-scenes story. An examination of singer-songwriter Bui’s website, however, suggests that the actual explanation simply relates to her realization that a self-released album was less likely to garner attention than one on a label, hence the creation of her own Drunken Butterfly Records and the revived freshness of an album that’s already circulated for a few years.

Whatever drama that story lacks is more than compensated for within the album. This Is How I Recover is a startling debut of striking power, and its relatively brief 35-minute length announces Bui’s presence as an accomplished musical force. With a chameleon-like voice that reflects her diverse influences, Bui nonetheless establishes her own identity forcefully, standing apart from the quiet strums expected of a singer-songwriter by rocking out with a muscular guitar stomp often matched in intensity by her uninhibited wails.

“Hell Banknotes� opens the album with languid, almost ethereal vocals akin to Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, but the song takes little time to reveal Bui’s most pervasive influence: the bluesy bluster of ‘90s indie-rock staples like Come. Throughout the album, Bui unleashes an impressive torrent of crunchy guitar distortion, playing leads that reveal talents both technical and compositional; though she may lack the sterile virtuosic ability of an arena-rock guitar hero, her parts are creative, searching, and well beyond any simplistic strum-and-sing model. She’s able to build tension with her voice, but also with her guitar, as the soft strums and arpeggios of “Untitled #2� barely contain the violence of a few slashed chords that perfectly complement the song’s lyrics. “I get so angry I break in half and stab you with part of me�, Bui sings, “A jagged edge would hurt like you would not believe�. Listening to her, you believe it.

Drummer Mark Taylor assists to notable effect on “Manic Depression�—very much not a Hendrix cover—creating an ominous percussive undertow over which Bui lays a tale of mental instability in a Tanya Donnelly voice that suits the theme nicely. Other tracks address equally heavy fare, with “Hyphen American� weighing in on the complexities of dual identity (Bui is Vietnamese-American) and “A Virgin’s Anthem� furiously rejecting masculine sexual politics, but Bui’s obvious cultural literacy never impedes the directness of her songs with pedantic showiness. Closing song “The Beauty Myth� may take its title from a Naomi Wolfe tract, but as it escalates from a soft introduction to a jittery barrage of distortion, its indictment of sexism is all Bui’s own.

The brief, delicate instrumental “Roses� proves guitar distortion is a tool, not a crutch for Bui. Indeed, the most chilling moment on This Is How I Recover comes on the acoustic blues of “Checked for Bruises�, a haunting tale of abuse. “I’m doin’ everything I can / Tryin’ hard to please my man�, Bui sings, before abandoning standard blues tropes for the harrowing punch line: “I give until my hips are sore / But that’s not what I was beaten for�. While most of the album resists any facile attempt to compare Bui to Ani DiFranco on the dubious grounds of them both being female singer-songwriters, “Checked for Bruises� does show an Ani-worthy ability to crawl under the skin and stay there.

The major flaw on Bui’s debut is the production, clearly done on the cheap and often sounding it. While this does inadvertently hearken back to her ‘90s feminist forbearers, like the Ohio band Scrawl, whose noisy epics also suffered from a certain tinny production, it also reins in the sonic impact at times. It’s not clear whether Bui’s vocals are buried beneath the music intentionally, a la that early ‘90s indie-rock sound, or as a result of poor mixing, but that too sometimes hampers the album, especially in the absence of a lyric sheet. Still, This Is How I Recover is a remarkable album; it doesn’t show promise, it delivers on it. Carol Bui deserves attention, and she won’t be self-releasing her work for long. - PopMatters.com

June 16, 2006

Review by Andrés Carrera

Innocently enough, Carol Bui's album, This Is How I Recover, begins with a slow driving brushes-upon-drum-kit rhythm and a bare-essentials vocal performance. Slightly off-tune guitars make their way through the smoky atmosphere, and through this fog, Carol's voice appears like a sharp and radiant landmark, embracing each chord progression with strong and heartfelt panache.

Bui knows exactly what she wants to accomplish with her songs. A re-release of the self-released album back in March of 2004, Bui's album is a well-planned, well-executed mix of outright rock songs and blues-inspired bliss. "Checked For Bruises" is a blues song that develops into rock themes as Carol's acoustically-accompanied wail rides the setup perfectly. Each song makes the best use of Carol's dedicated voice, as she squeezes as much feeling out of her Fender Telecaster to match the vocals. An accomplished guitarist with a sexy-bluesy approach, her guitar parts are valid, complex parts that convey gritty attitude and feminine delicacy, as in the solo-guitar song "Roses" or in intros to "A Virgin's Anthem" or "Manic Depression". Hardly a one-person act, however, her songs are drawn with a band setting in mind, as harmonic basslines carry the lead while Carol takes time to focus on rugged or pretty lyrics. "The songs just pour out when I've got lots to say", she says in "Untitled 2", and she stands ready to present strong evidence for her argument.

With ten tracks of pure, unfiltered rock attitude and raw talent, Carol Bui introduces herself as an act that anyone would be crazy to want to miss. Her songs give plenty of enjoyable female vocal beauty and slightly coquettish details, but also deliver large uncharacteristic amounts of attitude and guts when compared to any artist, male or female. Never retreating to hide behind cheap effects, confectionery cliches, or sheer volume, Bui is the authoress of rock songs that live up to the potential of the genre, a dying art given her contemporaries. The blues-infused rock songs with an independent feel make the music sound more like mid-90's indie-rock albums for the authenticity and sincerity that they convey. She faces her audience, guitar in hand, ready to level any expectations of weakness and to smash any boredom with female-led rock to pieces. Thank you, Carol Bui, for making an album that demonstrates rock's essentials with beauty, personality, and wit.

Recommended If You Like: Victory At Sea, the Cranberries, Arkade, Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, Belly - Upbeetmusic.com

August 15, 2005

Review by Bret McCabe

Washington's Carol Bui plays guitar like a girl--a pithy, no-BS, hard-rocking girl who favors fretwork dissonance over pretty jangle. Her This Is How I Recover debut reveals a singer/songwriter with brassy pipes and a brain full of ideas to unload in streamlined power-trio format. Noisy, rippling room-shakers such as "A Virgin's Anthem," "Hell Banknotes," and "Checked for Bruises" recall the salad days of Sleater-Kinney and Throwing Muses, but the real prototype is Salem 66's knack for the gorgeous melodic kernel inside the jagged, off-kilter rock. Bui's voice doubles as both lovely foil to noisy eruptions and siren call above a knotted riff, and the skin puckers when her power chords underscore a throaty scream - Baltimore City Paper

Why are all depressed female singers with soul compared to Tori Amos? Like that chick from Evenessence – much more Tool than Tori. And Maynard can sing higher than most girls anyway. So it’s settled: Carol Bui wrings her despair through Eastern scales like the iron-larynxed Maynard James Keenan. Her intricately sloppy guitar style, with its bluesy grit and jarring additive rhythms, makes me want to mosh and self-mutilate. Whoever “discovers” this girl, takes her out of Fairfax, and gives her a big contract might have an icon on his hands.
- By Daniel Patrick

Let’s take a minute and play a game of “Subvert that Song” – in this case paraphrasing a line from Ms. Bonnie Tyler, of Footloose fame – and ask ourselves this, and only this: “Where have all the good women gone?” Our old and trusted heroines seem to be fading quickly. PJ Harvey made a hasty exit (stage right), with her promised return-to-form going out with a whimper instead of the colossal bang that long-time fans expected; Kathleen Hanna, who once so adamantly demanded that we collectively suck her left one, now plies her trade with “adorable” hands-on-hip and tongue-in-cheek postures; even Liz Phair, our Most Holy Lady of Unrepentant Fuckery, has repatriated herself back into Guyville by posing as an absurd and ultimately empty cheesecake model.

Seriously: what happened to the so-called “Female Revolution” in music, when the fairer sex promised to not only rock harder, but rock smarter than any man in the scene? Admittedly, there have and always will be strong women in rock – I imagine the likes of Patti Smith, Exene Cervenka, and Kim Gordon would send me a metaphysical psychic backhand if I didn’t say otherwise – but recent trends in popular music reveal a dearth of females who are willing to plug-in, turn-up, and give the trusty ol’ DS-1 a good stomp. I have seen faceless sex symbols, wispy chanteuses, and whiny folksters by the dozen, even the occasional riot grrl masking her harmlessly cute clichés as femme punk attitude; however, with the exception of a few relentlessly innovative standard-bearers (God bless their stalwart hearts), it seems that no one is willing to pick up the glove unwittingly thrown down by Kristen Hersh all those years ago.

This being the case, I didn’t expect much when I got ahold of a copy of Carol Bui’s self-released debut LP This Is How I Recover, despite the ardent praise and admiration I've heard. At best, I expected a tired retread of alt-rock girl-pop, a la Veruca Salt or Juliana Hatfield; at worst, I expected a Le Tigre cover band. What I didn’t expect was 35 minutes of visceral, blues-driven and post-punk-inflected rock music, anchored by a schizophrenic voice that’s sweetly seraphic at one moment and all righteous fury the next. This is anachronistic music in the best sense possible, harkening back to the glory days of quietly momentous college rock. It’s smart and raucous, introspective and loud, and proof that the revolution’s unofficial credo – i.e., women can indeed make sharp, intelligent, and universally appealing rock music without relying on the crutches of militant feminism – still lives on.

The most immediately striking aspect of Bui’s sound is her guitar work, which constantly rides that fine line between melody and noise. She’s unafraid of dissonance, favoring a tone that’s harsh and metallic, and balanced with a sloppily virtuosic style that’s reminiscent of J Mascis, Doug Martsch, or even Stephen Malkmus. However, what makes her fretwork so interesting are the unexpected melodic shifts that it’ll take, which often resemble the best moments of Hersh’s guitar playing in Throwing Muses. For example, “A Virgin’s Anthem” opens up with an abrasive, vaguely bluesy riff, which eventually gives way to sweetly melodic single-note plucking before bursting into a slightly dissonant, Sonic Youthish (circa Dirty) chord progression. It’s a wonderful switch, and the style lends her songs a subtle sense of variation that prevents them from dragging or becoming too repetitive.

Vocally, Bui often sounds like a cross between Sleater-Kinney and the aforementioned Muses. She has great range, with a voice that swaggers between Corin Tucker’s big, brassy notes and the smoky, serene croon that Hersh favored in Throwing Muses’ quieter moments. Furthermore, her vocals often act as the cohesive force behind all the songs, swooping in and ensuring that the instruments remain consistent and unified throughout each track. It’s no coincidence that one of the weaker moments on the album is a short guitar instrumental titled “Roses,” which dawdles on far more than necessary. While the guitar work is impressive, the track seems much longer than its minute-length would suggest.

There are a few missteps here and there, the most notable being a solo acoustic piece called “Checked for Bruises.” Bui’s strength is most evident in her full-band arrangements, and her two solo pieces on the album can quickly become repetitive and a little tiresome. But these are only minor annoyances, and they do not detract at all from the cutting guitar work and swirling rhythms of her other pieces; if anything, they help to buoy the album as a whole, offering a welcome reprieve and a quiet moment of reflection between the louder, more abrasive tracks.

This is How I Recover is a confident and striking debut, filled with passion and verve. Every track on the album is greatly indicative of Bui’s impressive songwriting talents and technical skill, from the quiet and darkly unassuming notes of the opening track “Hell Banknotes” to the driving, almost arena-like rock of the closer “Beauty Myth.” And if it ever sounds familiar, as if the album itself is calling from a different time period, it is only because it evokes a more wondrous period in indie music, when every song spawned by the underground seemed to hold promise and limitless potential. Bui is off to a magnificent start in her career, and I can only see her becoming better and better.

- by Joon Kim

Carol Bui sings like a woman with perfect posture. The music reels from raucous to serene, and the lyrics run the emotional gamut from chaotic families to foreboding weddings to figuring out how to cyberflirt. But even when she bellows a chorus, tells stories out of school about mother-daughter strife, or bites off a lyric about starving to fit into a dress, Bui's bold tone is steady as a rock.

Everyone Wore White is Bui's second LP, following her 2004 debut This Is How I Recover. Bui has been compared to Kristin Hersh, partly because they're both women who tear it up on guitar. But her writing and her fretwork-- equal parts punk, blues, piss, and a pedestal to stand on-- hew closer to those of J. Robbins in Jawbox and Burning Airlines, or, considering her gift for tunes, maybe Heart. Her fierce guitar, matched by cellist Jenny Petrow, creates soaring melodic hard rock with engrossing sincerity-- as Bob Mould has proven, you can't b.s. a cello. Credit Aloha's T. J. Lipple for the drum work and the stellar production, which translates her intensity to record without losing its beauty or nuance. In the tradition of her hometown of Washington, D.C., she's made a punk-bred record where the guitar is loud but the tunes prevail.

Sometimes the mix poises her too angelically above the fray-- for example, the verse of "St. Elizabeth's", before the chorus rages in. And listeners who crave angst might find Bui reserved, although it's hard to picture not being moved by the abused lover on "Hypnagogia" who lists her blows-- and explains, "I can't lose composure." The most striking performance closes the album: she sings the traditional song "Qua Cầu Gió Bay" ("The Wind on the Bridge") a capella, in a tone so powerful it fills in the meaning that's lost if you don't speak Vietnamese. According to one translation online, it's a song about the things you do on a bridge with a boy that you'll never speak of to your ma and pa. And from the sound of her voice, Bui doesn't regret a thing.

-Chris Dahlen, November 09, 2007
- Chris Dahlen

Dear Carol Bui,

Thank you for Everyone Wore White (available Oct. 2 on 54o40' or Fight!), a record that manages to be culturally unique and universal, beautiful and harrowing, frequently within a single song.

Thank you for the handwritten note, which accompanied the CD and pointed out that the nipples on the cover did not belong to you.

Thank you for demonstrating that a female artist can make thought-provoking music and still kick out the jams.

Thank you for the lyric about bundt cake.

Thank you for taking the time to craft an entire album, one in which I find something new to like each time I play.

Thank you for not visiting the Twin Cities on your tour. Yes, that is sarcasm.

Thank you for completing, along with Exile in Guyville and Rid of Me, a rock trifecta.

Move-out-of-your-parents'-basement-music-geek-only note: Everyone Wore White was recorded at Inner Ear Studios, birthplace of the classic Fugazi, Minor Threat and Bad Brains albums.
- Luftmensch

It's a tempest in a teapot almost entirely forgotten now, but when Liz Phair's Exile in Guyville was first released, there was a fair amount of kerfluffle about the semi-naked woman in the Polaroid shots in the CD booklet, who turned out not to be Phair but a friend of hers. Similarly, singer/songwriter Carol Bui would like everyone to know that although there is a quite pretty drawing of a topless Asian-American woman on the cover of her second album, she wasn't the model. That's not the only point of comparison between Exile in Guyville (or PJ Harvey's Dry, or Rufus Wainwright's Poses, to name other examples) and Everyone Wore White: although it's entirely possible that Bui wrote these ten songs (plus an a cappella cover of a traditional Vietnamese folk song) in character voices other than her own -- that she's no more the woman in the songs than she is the woman on the cover -- there's an intimacy to her performances that suggests otherwise. There aren't just big themes on this album, there are Big Themes, from the many-layered symbolism of the album title (in opposition to its western connotations, white is a color of mourning in many Asian cultures, and then there's the whole "passing for white" concept as well) through to Bui's poetic, emotionally shaded lyrics. Musically, the album reminds listeners that Bui is based in Washington D.C., with all the post-rock angularity, sudden dynamic shifts, and full-on guitar noise assaults that implies. Although Bui's press kit names Hole as a key early influence, Mary Timony's similarly sweet-and-sour dissonance on the early Helium albums is a much closer musical fit to songs like the jittery, propulsive "The Year After." Combining the lyrical weightiness with the spiky post-rock vibes of the music makes Everyone Wore White the sort of album one takes in slowly, over the course of a few close listens, rather than absorbing all at once. Those willing to take the time will be amply rewarded. - Stewart Mason

On the new Everyone Wore White (54° 40' or Fight!), Carol Bui more than delivers on the promise of her self-released 2006 debut, This Is How I Recover. Her brambly guitar work, sly melodies, and self-possessed vocals call to mind the Throwing Muses, PJ Harvey, and Sleater-Kinney, but the quirks are unexpected: subtle, cinematic string treatments, pensive lyrics that seem like they were daydreamed into existence, and occasional nods to Bui's Southeast Asian heritage (including an electrified take on "Qua Cau Gio Bay," a Vietnamese folk song). "Quan Am," a haunting original, is one of her best songs to date: its spectral vocal harmonies, contorted feedback guitar, and broad, sinewy drumming (courtesy of Aloha's T.J. Lipple, who also produced the album) make me want to dust off my old Salem 66 LPs. Champion Kickboxer opens. All Ages 9 PM, the Note, 1565 N. Milwaukee, 773-489-0011 or 866-468-3401, $8, $6 in advance. —J. Niimi - J. Niimi