"Ashcan Orchid – The Woods"

This is the fourth of six blog posts in a series of female artists or female-fronted bands that will be published under 2024. This blog post deals with an obscure band called Ashcan Orchid. I consider myself skilled and competent when it comes to digging for information. If there is any information out there, I will find it, trust me. However, the only thing that I have found out is that Ashcan Orchid came from Portland, OR. It seems that they missed (or refrained) the second internet wave. One album can sometimes be enough for leaving a mark in music history (even more so in small subgenres that not many people know or care about). This is dark cabaret (which is a musical genre that draws on the aesthetics of burlesque, vaudeville and Weimar-era cabaret) mixed with gothic country. This should be mutually exclusive. It's dark cabaret or gothic country, not dark cabaret and gothic country. The end result could be disastrous as you probably can imagine. But this time it actually works. Their product declaration for their album caught my attention: "Cantillating scandalous hymns of carnage and lament; brutal, honest and timelessly out of time come the sordid tales of Ashcan Orchid. Their debut album "The Woods" was released in 2010. After that, they went into thin air. Let's indulge ourselves in counterfactual reasoning: what would have happened if they kept on going? We will never know and we can only speculate. I think that they would have made a bigger imprint. The best songs are "What Would My Mother Think", "Haunted", "La Bruja", "The Woods", "Stolen Ghost Waltz", and "When You're Dead". The arrangements are solid. This is so much better than all the copiers, fakers, imitators, impersonaters and imposters out there. "The Woods" isn't particularly rare. You can find an used copy here and there.