Great American Gingerbread

As a premier cello-rock band, Rasputina add a punkish attitude to everything they touch. This collection, which sports the subtitle, Rarities & Neglected Items, is a truly fun way of hearing a band that is often associated with a lugubrious heaviness. The ease of a track like “Do What I Do” that isn’t afraid to jump to add dance-club rhythms to its tough funk, or the general craziness behind a composition like “Black Hole Hunter” and its serpentine harmonies, make for inspired listening. The cover of the Pretenders’ “I Go to Sleep” is pitch-perfect, retaining all the seductive dreamlike sensations of the original matched with a powerful string arrangement. Rasputina leader Melora Cregar explains these are mostly solo works of film scores, demos, and stray tracks, but that doesn’t lessen the impact of the deep sawing behind “Loom” or the beautiful horror-movie approximations of “Death at Disneyland.” Even a simple one-minute track such as “Skylark” casts a gripping spell that’s hard to shake.