May 1 at The Bear Cave
By Sean Moeller

Casey Dienel’s piano was positioned on two slices of carpet remnant that a misbehaving cat had pissed on earlier in the day at the Bear Cave, a residential basement that will serve as quite a fond memory when the 21-year-old from Brooklyn is playing sold out gigs at Irving Plaza and she’s being showered with marriage proposals shouted out by obsessives in the crowd. It’s almost bound to happen. This show and this tour with Massachusetts-based Tigersaw (which she also plays and sings in), will seem like such a lark when all of it does.

She needed only about a song and a half before the BYOB-ing gathering was eating out of her palm, enchanted by her sweetness and fixated on her many different inflections, dynamic-grabbing ways, her sharp as a tack character sketches (one for a stripper, one for Nobel Peace Prize winner Linus Pauling whom she “kind of really identifies” with sometimes) and her sandy blond bangs. Dienel commanded our attention with opener “Doctor Monroe,” the first song from her Hush Records debut “Wind-Up Canary,” a powerful number about the death of a ladies man and a great indication of her own powers. It must be tiring to be likened to some of the charms that Regina Spektor possesses, but in Dienel’s case, it should only be an off-handed remark, like saying that a Kodiak sorta, kinda is the same thing as a grizzly or polar bear. They’re both bears, of course (who’s arguing that?), but where Spektor is a wanderer in her songs flying off the handle with her voice, letting it parasail onto whichever breezes it gets swept to, Dienel has a beautiful focus that while still adventurous and wildly unique doesn’t ever get thrown off-course. Her stories come first, not the contortions.

Her set was front-loaded with songs that were purposefully more cheery. Following ” Monroe” came “The Coffee Beanery,” a song that galloped and hitched much as Joanna Newsom’s “Inflammatory Writ” does. She played a song, that as Prince was for a short time, was known only as a nuclear fallout shelter symbol. It’s this song that she dedicated to Pauling, who first blew the horn on the damaging effects of the atomic bomb and won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1962. It’s engrossing to watch Dienel perform, as you can’t help but feel that she’s something very, very special. She’s like the little sister that was clever at an early age, somehow got worldly playing around in the backyard sandbox and is destined to capture the world’s attention. Dienel looks up during songs, finds someone she’s talked to earlier in the night and smiles at them with a friendly warmth before turning her eyes back down and melting you with a softly uttered bit of wording that seems too perfect for a song. You’d imagine her words about these real and fictional characters should be on display in a museum somewhere, protected by armed security guards around the clock.

She tells stories about her life one that seems extraordinarily long in relation to how old she actually is between sips of an alcoholic drink that she takes time to endorse twice. She, in her new red, thrift store sweatshirt with the self-embroidered c anary on the pocket, tells of her first visit to a strip club in Portland , when she visited the Hush Records offices for checker-playing and a picnic. She was amazed by the athletic abilities of the strippers, for a fact jealous of them. She shoved Sacagawea golden dollars at the “like they were casino chips,” and then went home to write the incredible new song “Better In Manhattan” (which will be featured in an upcoming Daytrotter session).

“I’d never liked Nine Inch Nails so much in my whole life,” Dienel said of her night at the club.

I could have watched her all night, listened to her all night that smile and the little dot of sparkle at the right-hand corner of her mouth as she sang about all these amazing people, but, like I said, the basement smelled like a cat had peed.

www.myspace.com/caseydienel
www.hushrecords.com