Author: Michael Pelusi
Source: Philadelphia City Paper Thursday, January 11, 2001
“…While songwriting can be a potentially frustrating waiting game, fortunately Mason’s been patient, honing her share of gems. Her early work was recorded solo on her home four-track and released on two cassettes—Untitled (1996) and Critical Neighborhood Map (1998)—on her label, Spiderwoman Records. She was pretty wary about working with other musicians…However, once she started hanging out at Soundgun Studio at the behest of one of the owners, her friend Edan Cohen, Mason changed her tune…Whatever diffidence she once felt toward adding other players, you’ll find few traces of it now. The resulting self-titled, Cohen-produced album is an exquisitely arranged affair, from the precise folk-rock backing on “Measure” to the unsettled string section on “Wit’s End”…Live the songs take on yet another new life. Among the musicians recruited for the album was Chris Powell, who in turn introduced Mason to Larry Brown and
Chris Reggiani. All three are also members of Need New Body, and you can just see the standard press blurb: Acoustic guitar-strummin’ songstress…joins forces with three-fifths of an art-jazz-rock freak-out troupe. But that’s a bit reductive when it comes to this group. Why accentuate polarities when they make music that sounds so natural? Their supple renditions of “Subtle Things” and “For a Living”—with Reggiani’s sturdy bass, Brown’s subtle guitar colorings and Powell’s inventive, quietly urgent percussion—underline the restless, even angry emotions that lurk in Mason’s songs. ‘We pretty much took the tunes and just arranged them for a live setting,’ says Brown, ‘And that’s something I think is a really great achievement. You come up with an album like that with great string arrangements, percussion, and computer effects and then take it and re-do it all over again for the sake of playing live. With these guys, with Chris, Chris, and Cynthia, we could probably do it again. Just for the fun of it.’”…