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Join us Friday, October 30th for an unforgettable evening of dark fairy tales in the spirit of the Brothers Grimm featuring Please Don’t Tell with a solo opening set from Sun V Set. Prepare for dark music and creepy surprises. Creative costumes are encouraged!The brainchild of songwriter, lead vocalist, and pianist Christina Fleming, Please Don’t Tell operated as a duo for years with Nicole Rimel accompanying her on cello and backing vocals; emerging from the pandemic in 2021 for a one-off show joined by violinist and vocalist Anna Hennessy, the three-piece idea stayed put. The Charlottesville, VA-based trio offer an intriguing, off-kilter mix of bedtime anxieties, folk witchery, and parlor naughtiness from an unnatural concoction of acoustic instrumentation. Yet despite all the old time-y bugaboos creeping under the melodic buoyancy of their songs, there’s nothing particularly retro about the music other than the fact that it could very well have been reproduced centuries earlier—and with nary a missed note.
What the music lacks in drums, it usually makes up for in Fleming’s percussive piano and her high-ceilinged operatic vocal delivery. When taken together, the sound of the three ladies and their varied influences peers down from the rafters in the menacing shapes of classical and choral strains, decades of goth club exposure, and the unshakeable shadow of bluegrass mountain sounds seeping in from their Central Virginia locale. In discovering that they are veteran performers of squalid punk holes and, well, The Kennedy Center, shouldn’t shock anyone paying attention.
Lyrically, the compositions waver between recounting the difficult stories of extraordinary women and more personal meditations, often dredging up the kind of painful punchlines only found buried in hardship, while others forgo any comic defense and let the heartbreaking realities of Fleming’s reflections on our dire existence hit the listener full on in the face. But more often than not, bleak misery comes with a knowing wink of contemporary black humor pointedly aimed to take down abusive husbands and skewer psychiatric conundrums of our contemporary world alike.
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Event venue
221 Water St E, Charlottesville, VA, United States, Virginia 22902
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