Lisa Germano began releasing her music in the 90's, first on Capitol Records, and then through the legendary 4AD imprint. Notable among them were the fantastic Geek, The Girl, and Excerpts From A Love Circus.
These records created a very special "antique," lost carnival
atmosphere - extremely personal, simultaneously self-effacing and
confrontational missives of emotional damage and impossible love. Right
from the start, she received considerable critical acclaim in
publications ranging from the most esoteric fanzines to the likes of
Spin, Rolling Stone, etc. I'm including a small sampling of the
coverage of her preceding album below. Lisa became the gold standard
for individualistic songstresses and just about every original new
female voice that appears winds up compared to her.
With the demise of 4AD, Lisa moved to a new label and unleashed the absolutely beautiful and wrenching audio journey Lullaby For Liquid Pig,
featuring woozy paeans to alcohol, fantasy landscapes and out-of-focus
dreams. Unfortunately this record company shut its doors just weeks
after the album came out and it went out-of-print until its 2007
re-release as a deluxe 2 CD set. In 2006, Lisa found a safe haven at
Young God Records and released the utterly stunning In The Maybe World. This was followed in 2009 by Magic Neighbor.
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It can't be
easy being a female singer-songwriter when you're either being expected
to bare your soul or be consistently off the wall, or possibly both at
the same time. If, like Lisa Germano, you've been around a while,
label-hopping and then fading out of the mass 'alternative'
consciousness, then you're up against the sheer marketability of, say,
Florence And The Machine. Germano is, however, far from being an artist
in retreat. Once signed to 4AD, she later dropped out of sight while
remaining a musical collaborator on various projects. Now signed with
Michael Gira's Young God label, she's resumed her solo career with a
sense of continuity and freshness.
Magic Neighbor
is her second album of new material for Young God. It's a short work,
but it never feels slight. Here Germano is part confessional artist,
part unreliable narrator. And while the opening instrumental "Marypan"
is indicative of some vaguely mournful, wistful mood, it is swiftly
followed by the sucker punch of "To The Mighty One". Here the shift in
focus is from a kind of slacker-romantic ennui to a passive-aggressive
revenge fantasy. "The Prince Of Plati" is similarly unsettling, where
the narrator appears to be a seducer/manipulator whose intentions are
cloaked in the yearning vocals and the lilting lullaby pace of a
romantic ballad. Amid some eerily close-miked vocals and atonal detours
there are more straightforwardly expressed emotions, and the overall
tone is one of calculated lugubriousness, but Germano's intelligent
songwriting keeps things from getting too doleful.
-Tom Ridge/The Wire December
The cover of German's latest album is a woodcarving of a forest glade, strewn with what are
probably leaves and branches but at a mistaken half-glance could be human bones. Germano's
own
music is caught in a similar, twilight ambiguity between the idyllic
and the disquieting. Songs like "The Mighty One" are lightly but
meticulously orchestrated, with Germano's dreamlike vocals lost unto
themselves but inviting. All around, it's the sort of album from which
you stumble blinking, having been temporarily lost in, wondering just
what happened.
-David Stubbs/Uncut
...With her piano and vocals at the fore, Germano finds plenty of room
to toy with the arrangements, filling the empty corners of each song
with small but sympathetic sonic details and a warmth and playfulness
that she's not always transmitted from her occasionally spectral remove.
"Marypan", an instrumental, begins like an overture, its questioning melody the perfect introduction to Germano's warped but not unwelcoming world. "To the Mighty One" features Germano teetering between childlike wonder and grown-up melancholy, the tonal unease enhanced by wobbling organ, piano, and what sound like outer space effects beamed in from the margins of the mix. "Simple" continues this exploration of contrast, its almost bluesy beginning giving way with little warning to a sprightly carnival waltz. Following "Kitty Train", another wistfully evocative instrumental interlude, "The Prince of Plati" resumes the bittersweet dance of innocence and experience, with Germano occupying a tough to pin down (but no less effective) emotional ambivalence summed up by the deceptively paradoxical line "You seem so unhappy; I can't take that today." Which leaves Germano feeling... where? Up? Down? It's unclear, but it's intriguing, as is Germano's decision to bury her already mumbled, muffled, and eventually manipulated mantra-like vocals in "Suli-mon" until she's just another layered exotic instrument.
Things are more clear on "Snow", where what could be Germano's feet pumping at the pedals of her piano comes across like a distant heartbeat, and Germano herself sounds almost like she's singing her near-whispered vocals right into your ear. Elsewhere, the swirling Omnichord of "Painting the Doors", with its surreal lyrics, may be no less strange and mysterious than the purr of a cat, but they're just as inexplicably comforting. This occasionally awkward intersection of intimacy and elusiveness pervades the disc, just as it pervades Germano's other high-wire-act works, but this time the end effect is oddly inviting. It's almost as if we're being allowed a glimpse into a blurry movie flickering away in Germano's head, projected sans subtitles and its plot obscured, yet somehow no less affecting for it.
"Marypan", an instrumental, begins like an overture, its questioning melody the perfect introduction to Germano's warped but not unwelcoming world. "To the Mighty One" features Germano teetering between childlike wonder and grown-up melancholy, the tonal unease enhanced by wobbling organ, piano, and what sound like outer space effects beamed in from the margins of the mix. "Simple" continues this exploration of contrast, its almost bluesy beginning giving way with little warning to a sprightly carnival waltz. Following "Kitty Train", another wistfully evocative instrumental interlude, "The Prince of Plati" resumes the bittersweet dance of innocence and experience, with Germano occupying a tough to pin down (but no less effective) emotional ambivalence summed up by the deceptively paradoxical line "You seem so unhappy; I can't take that today." Which leaves Germano feeling... where? Up? Down? It's unclear, but it's intriguing, as is Germano's decision to bury her already mumbled, muffled, and eventually manipulated mantra-like vocals in "Suli-mon" until she's just another layered exotic instrument.
Things are more clear on "Snow", where what could be Germano's feet pumping at the pedals of her piano comes across like a distant heartbeat, and Germano herself sounds almost like she's singing her near-whispered vocals right into your ear. Elsewhere, the swirling Omnichord of "Painting the Doors", with its surreal lyrics, may be no less strange and mysterious than the purr of a cat, but they're just as inexplicably comforting. This occasionally awkward intersection of intimacy and elusiveness pervades the disc, just as it pervades Germano's other high-wire-act works, but this time the end effect is oddly inviting. It's almost as if we're being allowed a glimpse into a blurry movie flickering away in Germano's head, projected sans subtitles and its plot obscured, yet somehow no less affecting for it.
- Joshua Klein/Pitchfork.com
Three
songs into Lisa Germano's eighth album, as an unfussy guitar line gives
way to a winsome waltz led by her own violin, she sings the realization
"That the world could be so simple." Of course, Germano has long since
realized that it's anything but, so she proceeds to rasp devastating
lines about "turning families into target practice" (on the title
track) while wrapping her grave words with filigrees of piano and
chimes. Little has changed since her mid-90's 4AD heyday, but
instrumental bagatelles like "Marypan" and "Kitty Train" reveal that
her touch remains as delicate as ever.
-David Bevan. Spin
Since her
4AD days, Lisa Germano has set harrowing narratives to beautiful
melodies, most notoriously, perhaps, in Geek the Girl's "A Psychopath"
with its incorporated 9-1-1 call. For Magic Neighbor, her sixth solo
album, Germano again wraps disturbing imagery and disquieting
epiphanies in velvety textures of piano and violin. However, her
subject here seems to be less one of romantic suffering and more of
escape through art. Germano has, perhaps, entered a stage of life where
interpersonal conflicts simmer, rather than erupting into violence,
where long-term lovers make a deal to ignore their relationship's worst
aspects. Magic Neighbor is about coming to terms with
not-quite-satisfactory ever-afters, about leaving mundane compromises
through stories and imaginary painted doors.
You can hear the tension in the music, as well as the words, as bits of orchestral fantasia introduce a flight to imagination. There's a syrup-y swoon of violin at the break in "To the Mighty One" just before Germano begins to imagine a story where "I am in control today." A fillip of flute and violin waltz frippery marks the shift in "Simple" when Germano takes leave of blues-strummed realism and begins to consider what would happen "If I ran away." "Oh tell me a story," she insists in her shrouded whisper, at the beginning of "The Prince of Piati," as if happier, simpler narratives were just a once upon a time away. And the people she values the highest take her entirely out of the mundane world, into a fantastic place where anything can happen, even happiness. "He must be a god/He can turn cats into furniture," she remarks in "Magic Neighbor". The real world is of limited interest here.
You can hear the tension in the music, as well as the words, as bits of orchestral fantasia introduce a flight to imagination. There's a syrup-y swoon of violin at the break in "To the Mighty One" just before Germano begins to imagine a story where "I am in control today." A fillip of flute and violin waltz frippery marks the shift in "Simple" when Germano takes leave of blues-strummed realism and begins to consider what would happen "If I ran away." "Oh tell me a story," she insists in her shrouded whisper, at the beginning of "The Prince of Piati," as if happier, simpler narratives were just a once upon a time away. And the people she values the highest take her entirely out of the mundane world, into a fantastic place where anything can happen, even happiness. "He must be a god/He can turn cats into furniture," she remarks in "Magic Neighbor". The real world is of limited interest here.
As in past recordings, Germano's voice is a clear, quiet luxury,
breathy and private, untouched by vibrato. Her playing - on piano,
violin and guitar - fills in the melodies beautifully, often working in
slight syncopation to the lyrics or fading to barely perceptible volume
under her voice. Songs flow smoothly, eddies of fiddle swirling around
occasional bumps and pauses in the melodic line but mostly full of
cool, liquid clarity. Little tempest of noise and distortion sometimes
pass over the surface (listen especially to "A Million Times"), but
leave these songs as unmarked and pure as lullabies. Moreover, there's
a serenity to this album that seems to mark an end to long suffering.
Germano has always been engaged in vercoming fear and hurt through
musical beauty. With Magic Neighbor she seems, finally, to have found
the escape hatch.
-Jennifer Kelly/Blurt-online.com 10/12
On
her latest, Magic Neighbor, Lisa Germano evokes her early-90's
recordings, On the Way Down from the Moon Palace, and Happiness. A
multitalented musician who plays the violin and the synth among other
instruments, Germano opens her album with the fuzzy, dark track "To The
Mighty One" and keeps her slow-motion, sleepy soundscapes lush and
lyrical. Her poetics live somewhere between a love letter and a suicide
note, like on acoustic rocker "Simple" when she sings, "Bitter and worn
out girl/ No one feels sorry for you." Her affection for spooky
orchestration is brilliantly displayed on "Suli-Mon," which features
weird manipulated vocals; "Painting the Doors" has Germano
collaborating with ambient musician Harold Budd for a dream-pop
interlude. The proof is all here; Germano is a musical genius who will
always be a step ahead of the nextbig indie-rock chick - whoever she
may be.
- Michael Levine /Bust Dec./Jan.
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