I had a chance to quickly chat with Carol regarding her music. The really good detail stuffs will come later when Bflat website is done. But for now, feast yourself on her majesty music comments.
Your back ground Carol?
I was born in the US, in Northern Virginia.
Full Name: Carol Thuy Thanh Bui
Age: 24
Location: Arlington, VA
Was you raised in a musical family?
My immediate family members are not musically inclined, but are great appreciators of music. I grew up in a household with music constantly playing, mostly Hong Kong film sound tracks and contemporary Vietnamese singers like Khanh Ly or Le Thu. My dad's taste has always been a little more eclectic than Mom's; he got me into some traditional celtic music and a few classic crooners, like Connie Francis and Nat King Cole. I LOVED Connie Francis. Her voice was amazing.
How did you get started with music? and why?
I picked up the guitar in early high school when I stopped playing flute. My uncle had this old classical guitar that he loaned to me, and I learned to play on that. At first, I took a few lessons just to learn the basics on fingering, barre chords, etc. I got bored, so I stopped and started learning on my own...mostly by figuring out Nirvana and Hole songs. Later I moved on to stuff like Jimi Hendrix and Sonic Youth, and that was when I started to feel inspired...
I chose music because I can't see myself doing anything else. I'm really passionate about performing live especially, and more often than not, I'm oblivious to other things going on around me when I'm playing for people. I find it to be very carthartic.
Influences?
Past and present influences: kat bjelland, thurston moore and lee ranaldo of sonic youth, marching band, joni mitchell, pj harvey, jimi hendrix, led zeppelin, trinh cong son (indirectly...I grew up listening to his songs around the house), jonny greenwood, tori amos, ella fitzgerald, billie holiday, fiona apple, aloha, jeff buckley, mary timony, pixies, stevie nicks, early 60s girl groups, pete townshend, sleater kinney, polvo, and gosh...there are tons more. I seem to discover something new to love everyday...right now, I'm listening to a lot of Kate Bush, Aloha (best band in the universe right now) and Can. I also love Kristin Hersh's new band, 50 Ft. Wave.
PS. I did not have a chance to tell Carol that Kristin Hersh's band was recorded on an API board for the tone. I got an API board and looking for a job.
Julian Duy Tran
Read Carol's music Review,
Upbeetmusic.com
June 16, 2006
Review by Andrés Carrera
Innocently enough, Carol Bui's album, This Is How I Recover, begins with a slow driving brushes-upon-drum-kit rhythm and a bare-essentials vocal performance. Slightly off-tune guitars make their way through the smoky atmosphere, and through this fog, Carol's voice appears like a sharp and radiant landmark, embracing each chord progression with strong and heartfelt panache.
Bui knows exactly what she wants to accomplish with her songs. A re-release of the self-released album back in March of 2004, Bui's album is a well-planned, well-executed mix of outright rock songs and blues-inspired bliss. "Checked For Bruises" is a blues song that develops into rock themes as Carol's acoustically-accompanied wail rides the setup perfectly. Each song makes the best use of Carol's dedicated voice, as she squeezes as much feeling out of her Fender Telecaster to match the vocals. An accomplished guitarist with a sexy-bluesy approach, her guitar parts are valid, complex parts that convey gritty attitude and feminine delicacy, as in the solo-guitar song "Roses" or in intros to "A Virgin's Anthem" or "Manic Depression". Hardly a one-person act, however, her songs are drawn with a band setting in mind, as harmonic basslines carry the lead while Carol takes time to focus on rugged or pretty lyrics. "The songs just pour out when I've got lots to say", she says in "Untitled 2", and she stands ready to present strong evidence for her argument.
With ten tracks of pure, unfiltered rock attitude and raw talent, Carol Bui introduces herself as an act that anyone would be crazy to want to miss. Her songs give plenty of enjoyable female vocal beauty and slightly coquettish details, but also deliver large uncharacteristic amounts of attitude and guts when compared to any artist, male or female. Never retreating to hide behind cheap effects, confectionery cliches, or sheer volume, Bui is the authoress of rock songs that live up to the potential of the genre, a dying art given her contemporaries. The blues-infused rock songs with an independent feel make the music sound more like mid-90's indie-rock albums for the authenticity and sincerity that they convey. She faces her audience, guitar in hand, ready to level any expectations of weakness and to smash any boredom with female-led rock to pieces. Thank you, Carol Bui, for making an album that demonstrates rock's essentials with beauty, personality, and wit.
Recommended If You Like: Victory At Sea, the Cranberries, Arkade, Joni Mitchell, Sonic Youth, Sleater-Kinney, Belly
Review by Monica Martin
Carol Bui blew me away with, This Is How I Recover. These songs were strong, piercing, beautiful, captivating, meaningful... so much so they were on constant repeat. With this beautiful blend right at my fingertips, I was more than happy to step into her world. Carol Bui's music is like a sweet compilation of various other artists, but surely has its own definitive sound. This Is How I Recover is her diary that she's exposed to the world; one peak and you're craving more. It feels like I've been a fan of her music for forever - a welcome home, if you will. She's so honest, so real, so revealing, it's a genuine connection on the first listen.
It's so easy to fall in love with her music, she's surely stepping it up for singer/songwriters out there. The instrumentals put together by this five piece band will surely captivate you. I could listen to This Is How I Recover time and time again.
Copper Press
May 2006
Review by Shawn M. Haney, The Daily Copper
In her debut offering, Carol Bui sticks to a formula of dissonance, passion, dark wit and crafty songwriting to provide heavy, charging rock numbers, delivering track after track with hurricane –like force. “Hell Banknotes” opens up This is How I Recover with a subtle and soft first verse, only to leap and branch out into an intense chorus, a climax aided by a gifted backing band. With a voice like an angel – sounding almost opera-trained - Bui reveals her darker side, fully realizing the impact she can create on stage by shifting the mood on the song to full-fledged dissonant rock. Certainly carving out her niche, Bui blends her melodies with balanced, intelligent narratives. Her songs buzz with energy, yet the pace of the record is relaxed, breathing easily from one song to the next. You can really feel softness in the last track, a highlight, “The Beauty Myth,” only to be surprised, filled with awe over her raspy, hellish vocal screams. When comparing Bui to other songwriters of her genre, one need only look to those of Buckley or bands like Victory at Sea to find them. There is even a hint of Egyptian tonalities in the song “I Don’t Call Him By Name,” a breath of fresh air away from usual college radio spins.
PopMatters.com
May 2006
Review by Whitney Strub
This grim little gem bears a 2004 copyright and an ostensible February 2006 release date, implying a potentially dramatic behind-the-scenes story. An examination of singer-songwriter Bui’s website, however, suggests that the actual explanation simply relates to her realization that a self-released album was less likely to garner attention than one on a label, hence the creation of her own Drunken Butterfly Records and the revived freshness of an album that’s already circulated for a few years.
Whatever drama that story lacks is more than compensated for within the album. This Is How I Recover is a startling debut of striking power, and its relatively brief 35-minute length announces Bui’s presence as an accomplished musical force. With a chameleon-like voice that reflects her diverse influences, Bui nonetheless establishes her own identity forcefully, standing apart from the quiet strums expected of a singer-songwriter by rocking out with a muscular guitar stomp often matched in intensity by her uninhibited wails.
“Hell Banknotes” opens the album with languid, almost ethereal vocals akin to Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star, but the song takes little time to reveal Bui’s most pervasive influence: the bluesy bluster of ‘90s indie-rock staples like Come. Throughout the album, Bui unleashes an impressive torrent of crunchy guitar distortion, playing leads that reveal talents both technical and compositional; though she may lack the sterile virtuosic ability of an arena-rock guitar hero, her parts are creative, searching, and well beyond any simplistic strum-and-sing model. She’s able to build tension with her voice, but also with her guitar, as the soft strums and arpeggios of “Untitled #2” barely contain the violence of a few slashed chords that perfectly complement the song’s lyrics. “I get so angry I break in half and stab you with part of me”, Bui sings, “A jagged edge would hurt like you would not believe”. Listening to her, you believe it.
Drummer Mark Taylor assists to notable effect on “Manic Depression”—very much not a Hendrix cover—creating an ominous percussive undertow over which Bui lays a tale of mental instability in a Tanya Donnelly voice that suits the theme nicely. Other tracks address equally heavy fare, with “Hyphen American” weighing in on the complexities of dual identity (Bui is Vietnamese-American) and “A Virgin’s Anthem” furiously rejecting masculine sexual politics, but Bui’s obvious cultural literacy never impedes the directness of her songs with pedantic showiness. Closing song “The Beauty Myth” may take its title from a Naomi Wolfe tract, but as it escalates from a soft introduction to a jittery barrage of distortion, its indictment of sexism is all Bui’s own.
The brief, delicate instrumental “Roses” proves guitar distortion is a tool, not a crutch for Bui. Indeed, the most chilling moment on This Is How I Recover comes on the acoustic blues of “Checked for Bruises”, a haunting tale of abuse. “I’m doin’ everything I can / Tryin’ hard to please my man”, Bui sings, before abandoning standard blues tropes for the harrowing punch line: “I give until my hips are sore / But that’s not what I was beaten for”. While most of the album resists any facile attempt to compare Bui to Ani DiFranco on the dubious grounds of them both being female singer-songwriters, “Checked for Bruises” does show an Ani-worthy ability to crawl under the skin and stay there.
The major flaw on Bui’s debut is the production, clearly done on the cheap and often sounding it. While this does inadvertently hearken back to her ‘90s feminist forbearers, like the Ohio band Scrawl, whose noisy epics also suffered from a certain tinny production, it also reins in the sonic impact at times. It’s not clear whether Bui’s vocals are buried beneath the music intentionally, a la that early ‘90s indie-rock sound, or as a result of poor mixing, but that too sometimes hampers the album, especially in the absence of a lyric sheet. Still, This Is How I Recover is a remarkable album; it doesn’t show promise, it delivers on it. Carol Bui deserves attention, and she won’t be self-releasing her work for long.
Miami New Times
April 20, 2006
Review of "The Beauty Myth" by Ray Cummings
She seizes your attention with hardscrabble, gritty guitar riffs and then holds forth on the title theme in aggro, anguished fashion, like the bastard spawn of Eddie Vedder and Alanis Morissette. Sure, no one's really heard of Carol Bui yet, but that could and should change, provided she kicks the habit of prefacing every song with a lengthy intro that telegraphs the melody she's about to wield like a garrote.
Editor's Pick on Smother.net
January 2006
Review by J-Sin
Carol Bui’s debut rocker “This Is How I Recover” is a testament to long lost post-punk, alternative, and indie rock albums by bands like Belly, Throwing Muses, and Victory at Sea. Her voice foils comparisons as she lingers on a key or note much longer than her predecessors. Dark and dank lyrics coarse through the musical veins of the album as she bellows with intimate melodic vocals. In addition to her vocals and guitar, she also plays flute on the album. You can also find her on albums by The Physics of Meaning with whom she’s toured and Beauty Pill. Killer.
Godsend
January 2006
A bold and potent debut from this Virginia-based singer and songwriter, 'This Is How I Recover' is a solid indie rock record that moves effortlessly from raw post-punk stomp to more sensitive indie-pop. Bui's vocals are distinctive and confident, while her band complements her with a strong, though not overly distinctive backdrop. Fans of strong indie songwriters like PJ HARVEY or KRISTIN HERSH should find plenty to enjoy in Bui's work. (Drunken Butterfly)
Neufutur
January 28, 2006
The simplistic guitar-driven rock of Carol Bui reminds one of Susanne Vega or even Alanis Morrisette; throughout all of this, there is a sound that is Bui’s and Bui’s alone. The earthy guitar work present on a track like “This Is How I Recover” draws listeners back to the days of Sebadoh, even as the arrangement of Bui’s seems much more influenced by medieval music than anything. Where carol Bui moves beyond other artists like Leah Zicari and the rest of that ilk is that there is actually musical arrangements that individuals want to hear on “This Is How I Recover”.
Too many singer-songwriters try to come forth in the American Idol-type of sound (Carrie Underwood) without really creating a full package that individuals would actually want to hear. Bui puts on equal footing eir band, and it is this consideration that puts “This Is How I Recover” along Liz Phair instead of Michelle Branch. There are even tracks on “This Is How I Recover” that are primarily instrument-heavy tracks, the most noticeable of which being “Untitled #2”. “Untitled #2” only uses Bui’s voice a few times throughout the track, really opting to have the guitars put forth the emotional content through their Appleseed Cast-like arrangements on the track.
When the two parts of this album separate (the vocal and the instrumental), the magic begins. On “Hyphen American”, the chaos of the instrumentation influences Bui’s voice in a very interesting way. This is done by essentially putting a light on the vocals, in order to make bizarre shadows that are not necessarily in the actual body. This “deep” sound works at odds with a very pop-laden sound, making “Hyphen American” a track for everybody. The disc is short – thirty-four minutes – but Bui crafts tracks that stretch out time and existence itself until that point when the disc ends and the listener is changed. This is traditional guitar-lead indie rock, but during tracks like the aforementioned “Hyphen American”, a flute comes in and makes a world of difference. The tension of being a current artist and having most of the songs on “This Is How I Recover” tied in heavily with a style that seems much older really pushes Bui and the rest of eir band to the next level. Sure, there are hints of the eighties and nineties here, but the music on the disc transcends any time period of pigeonhole-ready genre.
Decapolis
February 13, 2006
Review by by Jacob Gehman
Carol Bui fills a nice void in indie music. Her blues tinted rock is catchy without feeling like it’s sacrificing creativity or composition. One moment Bui can snarl, the next she can swoon.
She is an exceptional guitar player, both in actual skill and her ability to convey specific atmospheres in her playing. Very few female guitar players (especially in the indie scene) can do what she does song in and song out. Bui uses both electric and acoustic guitar to great effect. Less skillful is her singing. She’s not a bad singer by any stretch of the imagination. And as far as technical skill goes, she’s pretty good. Her voice lacks that certain punch to them to make them lasting. But they are a decent compliment to the guitar playing and song composition.
The biggest distraction to the album is that it sounds very indie. The production is hollow and weak. The mix is rather muddy. As a result the songs don’t ripple with power as they should otherwise. I’m sure that hearing these songs live would be quite the experience.
Definitely check out Carol Bui sound clips and see what you think. It’s a pretty good, if flawed, listen.
On Tap
November 2005 Issue
Interview and Review by Korin Miller
LABEL:DRUNKEN BUTTERFLY RECORDS
BANNER ACTS: CAROL BUI
Fresh out of college last year, singer-songwriter Carol Bui did what any new grad would do: She started her own record label. Drunken Butterfly Records was born and still boasts its roster of one: Bui, herself. The local songstress said she started Drunken Butterfly to put out "This is How I Recover," and notes that a label “looks better than ‘self-released’ or ‘unsigned.’” Can’t argue with that. “I’m hoping to find real label support as soon as possible, but it’s DIY until then,” she added. While this gritty blues artist runs the business by herself, she says she’s received guidance, advice and resources from other local labels to keep everything running smoothly. Bui said she’s too swamped with the work for her label to take on any new artists right now, but she hopes to one day pass on the administrative duties; After all, she needs to focus on the business’s artist development, too.
CAROL BUI
With a sound that’s oddly familiar (in a good way), yet unique enough to separate her from the crowd, Carol Bui floats to the top of the vast and varied talent pool of local musicians. Blues, rock, alt-punk—it’s all in her debut album, "This is How I Recover." Washingtonians—and anyone else for that matter—in search of good old-fashioned songwriting should look no further than Bui’s notable tunes “Hell Banknotes,” “Manic Depression” and a slew of others from her album. Keep an eye on this one.
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