Ratshin Back With Razor-Sharp Wit Singer Performs Friday At Street Music

Andrew Ratshin is back with a new CD and his first Spokane appearance in some time. He’ll appear Friday at Street Music.

Ratshin is the Seattle singer/ songwriter who led the ‘80s trio Uncle Bonsai. He’s been on his own for some time, performing under the unlikely sobriquet Electric Bonsai Band. He also has a six-voice group called the Mel Cooleys, from the character on the old “Dick Van Dyke Show.”

Ratshin performed regularly in Spokane with Uncle Bonsai during its heyday, but he may be best known here for an Uncle Bonsai song called “Boys Want Sex In The Morning”; it attained a kind of cult-hit status at Gonzaga University’s KAGU-FM a few years back.

His songs, wrote the New York Times, “have the verbal energy of Gilbert and Sullivan patter songs,” and others compare him to one of his heroes, satirist Tom Lehrer.

Ratshin’s new CD, “Lounging in the Belly of the Beast,” is packed with the wry commentary and intelligent lyrical jousting which always has been a hallmark of his work. As always, Ratshin hones his words to a razor-sharp exactness - the Maverick Report rightly calls him one of the best songwriters of his generation - and he turns his attention to the smallness of lives around him, including, one assumes, his own.

“I am folded up and fallow,” he sings in the title song, “I am cold and undefined/ I am molding this expression on my face/ I’m a little short of shallow/ I’m a coward by design/ And I’m taking up a lot of space.”

But all is not hopeless - or humorless - in Ratshin’s world. In a Ratshin song, there’s always a joke or a line to laugh at just beyond the next left turn.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: CONCERT Andrew Ratshin, a k a the Electric Bonsai Band, will perform at Street Music Friday at 8 p.m. Tickets are $10 at Street Music.