NPR – In Performance – Anne Watts and Boister: Music from Madness

The Band That Won’t Be Silenced – Urbanite Magazine

Some Moths Drink the Tears of Elephants: “A near perfect record”-NBT, Germany

Music has a spirit beyond tune and tempo. Music is alive. It occupies a space in time. One beat follows another, creating a rhythm. ‘Bad music makes you weak,’ as the late, great Charlie Freeman used to stay. Stands to reason good music has the opposite effect. The music in this recording will transport you to somewhere else, a made-up place that has never been. Part Morocco, part prewar Berlin, St. Louis with a touch of Hollywood. Sit back and put some gin in your glass. Let the gypsies carry you away. You’re taking off for parts unknown, to your own private Casablanca. The shadows are deep and dark. The women are spectacular and forbidding; the men are world-worn and mustachioed. Sirens and gauchos, holy virgins and matadors, legionaries and ladies of the night. A midnight meeting at the barricade. Film noir meets epic theater, Captain Beefheart meets Edith Piaf. One way or the other, this music will uplift and enhance your life. You will have more than you do. Listen and enjoy.

Jim Dickinson – Independence, Mississippi

Some Moths is a strange and wonderful record.

Garry Velletri, Bug Music

Boister’s relentlessly listenable songs of sorrow and pity, of sin and salvation, deftly stitch together musical swatches of pre-Weimar Germany, jazz-age Paris, and post-modern America to form a strong, seamless, 100 percent natural sound fabric.

Michael Yockel
New Times

Acknowledged by several masters (Jim Dickinson and Ike Turner have saluted her talents), Watts sings a smoky mood, of heartache and life’s tragedy…Of the same genre, but a lot cleaner than the impressive Black Rider of Tom Waits.

Renaud Paulik
magic!/Revue Pop Moderne

Situated between Nino Rota and Kurt Weill, never far from Debussy and Satie, Coltrane and Bartok…In this smoky room of nostalgia and tenderness, Watts elevates suave and cloudy melodies carried on a delicate trombone, a melancholy accordion, a compassionate clarinet.

Le Populaire du Centre

Boister’s music is inhabited by spirits, strange ambiances, and subtle messages. Melodies that seem familiar detach themselves for an instant to take on a certain spirit, then are lost. The musicianship is staggering…Anne Watts is mysterious and radiant at the same time.

Vibrations Magazine