2000

"This second pop/folk/rock CD from Ramona the Pest features the enchanting vocals of Valerie Esway mingled effectively with ethereal slide guitar from her husband, Lucio Menegon. Lush sounds from ukulele, piano, accordion, violin and horns accentuate the full sound of this extremely professional package. Esway's lyrics and progressive melodies are skillfully crafted and the songs are spooky and hypnotic, performed with the sensibility of a grown woman in touch with her darker emotions crossed with the dementia of a bad little girl. Esway has learned to contain her powerful vocal talents by toning down her dramatic range, belting out with urgency only when it adds to the delivery of a song. Mostly her voice is layered subtly throughout the album like a fine-tuned instrument with crisp, delicate strength. Little Knives was recorded and mixed by Menegon on a vintage 3m M23 one-inch eight-track recorder in the band's Berkeley, CA warehouse studio next to the tracks of the Union Pacific Railroad. It travels well.
- Devil in the Woods Magazine - Fall 2000

"Val Esway, Ramona the Pest frontwoman performed her stunningly, hauntingly best..." Urban View 12/08/00

"moody, adventurous and unpredictable" Contra Costa Times 11/30-

"lush and barbed folk-pop" East Bay Express 11/30-

"Agreeable Angst..." SF Chronicle 11/30-

"The 10th brings Valerie Esway's Bay Area "indie-folk-pop" band Ramona the Pest back to Sam Bond's Garage. The band's second full-length CD, Little Knives , which is brilliantly self-produced, caps off its lyric sheet with an Albert Schweitzer quote, and you just don't see him invoked that often in the rock world. Esway's ethereal vocals and Lucio Menegon's atmospheric guitar combine to make this varied and thoughtful collection shimmer darkly. You hear the word "haunting" so much in descriptions of this band, you'd think it were an Elvira side project. It's not. It is effective acoustic based music that strives for honesty." - Eugene Weekly (OR) 11/9/00


PEST-RIDDEN Preview: Ramona the Pest at Starry Plough, Sat. 9/16

Anyway you look at it, it's a good time to be Ramona the Pest. The Berkeley band was in San Francisco at the Bottom of the Hill on September 7 with Kindness and Penelope Houston Trio to celebrate the release of their newest musical offering, the chocolate-chip-cookie-rich Little Knives. The CD, their second full-length disc from Berkeley's Kingtone label, went to number 29 in KALX's July top 100. The band is having an East Bay CD release shindig, too; they'll be accented by the visuals of Thad Povey and Keith Arnold, and the music of Black Heart Procession at the Starry Plough on Saturday, September 16, and the show will also be broadcast on KALX's web site. Whew! All that, and they'll be heading off to tour the Northwest in November. Somehow, in between all this recording and promoting and performing their music, the members of RTP also manage to be consummate musicians. The 12 (+1) songs on Little Knives comprise a desperately packed bouquet of heartbroken lullabies and diary-frank revelations, following in the no-holds-barred indie folk tradition set by their first CD, Cans of Worms. Just as on that disc, the two most immediately noticeable and striking features of Little Knives are Valerie Esway's voice and each song's intently thoughtful arrangements. Each song strives to make the most of the musicians' talents and the soaring, luminous qualities of Esway's vocal chords. The arrangements this time around are more daring, featuring a cadre of musicians-including Esway's husband Lucio Menegon, Alex de Soria and Jon Curtis of Peachfish, Gunnar Madsen, Kathleen Fernald, and Ari Fellow-Mannion-who play everything from a vintage Hammond B-3 organ to violin and ukulele. The song offerings on this new outing are dark and contemplative. Esway's lyrics explore the inevitable calamities of love in songs such as "Crash!" with wit and occasional rage that recall Ani DiFranco. (Relationship troubling ya? Try this line on for size: "Here we stand knee deep in each other's crap/I throw it at you and you hurl it back." Hoo-ha!) There are also more complex and less explicit musings on loneliness, apathy, and disconnectedness, most notably on "Big Black Hole". The title track, though, belies the philosophical question at the album's heart: How do you know what's best when nothing or no one is telling you what to do? The answer: A line from "Close to Far From Here" borrowed from humanitarian Albert Schweitzer: "All work that is worth anything is done in faith". The faith, here, it seems, is in the music. The album also takes advantage of a great benefit of the indie music paradigm: They've made a limited pressing of 1,000 Cds in elegant hand screenprinted packaging, as if the fine music weren't enough of a gift. Ramona the Pest is an example of independent music at it's finest: unique, compelling music that is entirely self-produced and distributed. While they'd certainly be commercially successful at a large label, RTP's music is too personal and too idiosyncratic to thrive in any corporate setting, and here's hoping they won't be trying that route any time soon. - Urban View (Oakland, CA) 9/13/00

 

1999

The Fairfield County Weekly (CT)
June 24,
1999
"Surrealistic Surprises"

"...I thought Ramona the Pest was just another storybook character. Wrong again! If my sojourn into the surreal world taught me one thing, it was that I don't really know anything. Except that now I know Ramona the Pest is a band from California. Or in this case, another pared down duo. This time in the melodious form of Valerie Esway and Nutmeg State native Luciano Menegon on their current tour. Again, don't let the "duo" thing scare you. The songwriting is strong and poetic--with a delicious dark side. The music is haunting and melodic, the lyrics ominous--citing monsters, more monsters and a dark, little anti-corporate advertising ditty... "This shit is really good for you," goes the satirical croon. Esway's impressive vocal command lives in perfect harmony with Menegon's guitar mastery. Comparisons to the Cowboy Junkies, Concrete Blonde and P.J. Harvey seem inescapable. The band may be stripped down to temporarily two, but the performance promises to be one worth catching. And you can do just that this Saturday, June 26 at Green's Saloon (85 Woodside St., Stamford).

The moral of the story is to expect the unexpected, and before you go pinching yourself just to make sure it's all real, maybe you should think about taking a deep breath, keeping an open mind and embracing whatever musical gifts the universe is offering. Surreal or not, you might just find yourself a gem. - Terri Lagerstedt

Chicago Reader
July 9, 1999
Ramona the Pest 7/15, PUFFER BROTHERS; 7/16, THE HIDEOUT

This well-kept Bay Area secret, named for an early feminist heroine of mine, is normally a quartet, but this acoustic duo tour is doubling as a honeymoon for guitarist Lucio Menegon and vocalist-guitarist Valerie Esway. On their fifth and latest full-length, Cans of Worms (Kingtone), the rhythm section, strings, and horns add considerably to the moody folk-rock songs. But I'm willing to bet that Esway--who can sound like Polly Jean Harvey with less blues or Carla Bozulich with less bile--could carry a show all by herself if she had to. ---Monica Kendrick

Seven Days (Burlington, VT)
June 30, 1999
"Hold THE DDT"

Bored on the Fourth of July? Try a little pestilence. Despite their irksome sounding name, Ramona the Pest do little to annoy. Instead, the haunting voice of Valerie Esway, in conjunction with Lucio Menegon's acoustic guitar, assures a riveting, Violent Femmes-meets-Cowboy Junkies performance. The avant-folk duo pester Borders Sunday afternoon, followed by a longer--and louder--show at Red Square Monday.

Tahoe (CA) Daily Tribune 4/99

Ramona the Pest, led by the astounding vocals of Valerie Esway, offers dark, melodic,haunting tunes."

Arizona Daily Star 3/99

Valerie Esway's voice is a haunting musical instrument. She and her progressive folk-pop-rock band Ramona the Pest constitute one of the San Francisco Bay area's most promising young groups.

East Bay Express (Berkeley, CA) 10/98

Valerie Esway's powerful, lithe vocals have blossomed into apocalyptic odes with a dark, brooding, largely acoustic sound full of Lynchian Creepy-crawly-isms. - Sam Hurwitt

Eugene (OR) Weekly 3/98

Ramona's latest CD, Cans of Worms, shows a band with dark touches and a restrained acoustic approach, producing a constantly mutating progressive rock. Valerie Esway's vocals manage to sound both troubling and breezy. Hers is a big round voice that likes to go up on its edges, trill throatily, or pass through some Middle Eastern in-between notes. "Monsters in the Window" provides almost a pop framework, on which bits of graceful melody are hung, amid lush backing vocals. "Uninvited Guests," built around an angular guitar riff, comes off as a skewed gem. Likewise "Martyr Girl." Wish I'd had a lyric sheet The melodies glide through those uncomfortable intervals, and the band thrashes tastefully, with ex-Counting Crow Tobias III providing percussion. Very interested to see this happen live. - David Gingold.

East Bay Express 10/24/97
Ramona the Pest at the Starry Plough, Saturday, October 18.

...RTP plunged into its set with a playful style blending the trance-like tones of Cowboy Junkies with the fiery intensity of Violent Femmes. Opening with "Pesticide" off the band's new album, Cans of Worms, singer Valerie Esway wailed away over the spooky distortion and Michael Stipe-like backing vocals of lead guitarist Lucio Menegon, the staccato percussion of former Counting Crow Tobias Hawkins (his drum kit consisted of bongos, a PVC bucket, tambourine, cymbal, frying pan, and a silver spray-painted mannequin head, all precariously duct-taped together), the steady electric bass of Mike Godwin, and the dissonant violin of Jeff Hobbs. On "Frostbite Lullabye #3," Esway displayed impressive range, rising from low moans to high-pitched yowls. Eerie violin plucking, sharp, syncopated drumbeats, and Menegon's dulcimer-like tapping of his guitar strings overlapped to create the bouncy sound of coiled springs. "Vultures," the band's strongest piece, began with a plodding rhythm that conjured up a languorous drive through the desert. "Jealous demons go away!" implored Esway, her voice swelling and sinking to the alternately hypnotic and feverish chords of her band mates. By the time the set ended with the howls of "Cactus," most of the remaining audience was seated on the floor-not napping, but cast under the spell of a band as impish and innovative as its children's-lit namesake.--Lilan Patri.

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