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Featured on MTV/LOGO, NPR, WERS, and in Curve Magazine, and voted Rhode Island's Best Female Alt-Rock Vocalist, award-winning songwriter and avant-soul piano diva Kristi Martel grew up in New England and earned an ASCAP grant and two music degrees (Bard and Mills College) before beginning her touring and recording career. Her sweet presence and fearless songwriting endear audiences nationwide. Her piano playing combines her love of blues dissonance and syncopation with her classical training. Her powerful voice is at once sweet and bitter, emotional and visionary, articulating prayers and quirky autobiographical narratives in the same breath. Through Sealed Lip Records she has released six CDs. Ravengirl is Kristi's goofy joke superhero name for herself, her recognition of the crazy blessing it is that she felt joy everyday, amidst the profound grief, after her former life partner's suicide in 2003. This newest album is full up with that joy, with the healing and transformation Kristi has undergone to be singing still so powerfully today. Ravengirl received a "highly recommended" from the Providence Journal and stellar reviews from Motif Magazine, Bay Windows, Curve Magazine, and the Providence Phoenix. Kristi has just recorded demos for her next full-length CD, Sacred Whore. The work is more jazz and soul, and focuses on the universal in our human experience and our need for inner and world peace.
".a fine musician.Incomparable!" -- Utah Phillips
"Kristi Martel loves life, and the joy she gets out of it exudes from her every pore. She can be singing about the darkest things in the world -- betrayal, self-hate, death -- and yet somehow, coming from her, it feels hopeful and uplifting." -- Marion Davis, Motif Magazine
"She grins when she sings. Watching her perform, it's impossible not to get swept up in the sheer joy of music -- in her deft piano playing and soaring, soul-rhythm-and-blues voice, love emanates from every note." -- Vienna Teng
"Martel proves that she's a powerful storyteller, with meaningful lyrics, passionate performances, and an emotional mission." -- Bob Gulla for The Providence Phoenix
Kristi Martel’s Ravengirl: "In this arresting, intense and surprisingly uplifting album, Martel works out some of her feelings about her lover's suicide.raw awareness, bemused and hurt but grateful and joyous, .makes Ravengirl so compelling. The album begins with the eerie instrumental "Oya," a sort of rite of passage easing us into Martel's psyche. Martel then wraps us in the gentle "Day of Rain," a song about the day you realize the crying is finally over and are able to look back, calm and clear-eyed. The collage of memories that follows is tinted with the full spectrum of emotion, and Martel's nimble voice constantly shifts with the music. "I am doing fine, I am doing fine," she bubbles; it's not some ironic mantra or attempt at manifesting, just a cheerful chorus of simple truth. She's doing fine indeed, and the album soars way above fine." -- Brian Jewell for Bay Windows
Discography:
Sacred Whore Demos (LP 2009)
Ravengirl (LP 2006)
Quaint & Curious Ravendemos (LP 2005)
The Mule (LP 2004)
bound (single 2003)
brave enough (LP 2001)
give me a little. (EP 2000)
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