Review: Exploring the underground music colony
Rating: 4 out of 5
Date: 12 19, 2013
Author Brad Branham has a definite knack for walking the walk and talking the talk of that dark and seemingly twisted world of underground rock bands. Despite his credentials being well lodged in the world of electrical engineering and software development on NASA projects, defense contracting, and scientific pursuits, his gut level response is for raw life fiction and offering other views and stances on those parts of the population that are esteemed by some, ignored by others, and avoided by most. There has to be a degree of music performer in this man to be able to describe his chosen life set of this novel - the underground rock bands. He observes them well and offers a different more entertaining cadence to this genre of novels than most other writers - a reminder of sorts of `The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test' by Tom Wolfe of 1968, but bounced forward some 45 years and with a hefty does of acid rock/goth/heavy metal et al.The story opens in snowy Portland, Oregon where we meet Blar Umlaut (great name, cleverly devised!) who has been famous as a rock band musician once but his career is in abeyance at present. He meets Tsika, an exotic appearing Russian goth bass player who after a fall in the snow finds herself in the shower and loft of Blar. They have much in common - both are involved in weird garb and weirder music and both have their own concept of bands (Tsika has The Lost Girls - Tsika, Glycerin and Kpau) and it is this nonchalant coming together that leads the two into a different passage through the unreal fantasy world of underground rock as we follow these strange, volatile but ultimately fun and needy fellow human beings around the strange Dantesque levels of emotional highs and lows.Branham writes well, able to paint the scenery and costumes of these grungy musicians with great skill. And at the core of his book are life lessons about relationships and dreams and fantasies that rise above the odd stagecraft. It makes us wonder where his next volume will take us. Grady Harp, December 13