Sundae + Mr. Goessl
Fun & Fancy
Self-Released
Wife-and-husband Kate Voss and Jason Goessl are each award-winning musicians in their own right. Both have performed with many well-loved Seattle outfits as well as with some of the jazz greats, but are probably best known for their touring duo, Sundae + Mr. Goessl.
Their sixth full-length studio album Fun & Fancy is packed with dreamy, jaunty romance and stewing heartache. They tap into a deep well of nostalgia for simpler times with their refined vintage sound. Many of their original songs on the album are so classic in their composition you might expect to recognize them at first. Sundae + Mr. Goessl do the thing they do right down to every detail, not only glowing with charm but flashing with undeniable mastery of their craft. With “Darlene,” “I Love My Baby Better” and “Might as Well (Cuz Love is Hell),” they easily manage playfulness but sacrifice none of their grown-up, sophisticated signature sound.
On “Love Me Dearly,” a song penned by another prolific Seattle powerhouse Celene Ramadan (Prom Queen) with whom Goessl has performed, the pair lilts and sugars the woebegone lyrics into something more bubbly and punchy. Their take on “My Melancholy Baby,” the torch song for which the term was coined, is more warm and sanguine than well-known performances by Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Shore. Goessl paints in the backdrop with colorful tremolo while Voss cinematically draws in the lines of the melody with the melodica.
More spartan in arrangement than some of their previous recordings, they are supported on a few of the tracks with tastefully subtle splashes of percussion, strings, and back-up vocals, but it is Voss’s effervescent voice and genial melodica playing, and the highly developed and expressive guitar tone of Goessl that stand front and center on Fun & Fancy.
–Meredith Cooper
