Send "Lisa Germano " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 There's glum, and then there's Lisa Germano glum, a sort of wry reaction to bearing the heavy weight of the world mingled with the realization that life might not get much better. It's not totally without hope, but it is the weary sound of real life pressing down from all sides, unfiltered through the usual irony and dramatic stylistic flourishes. It's often not exactly fun, either, and while Germano may rue the comparison, it's hard to jibe her work as a solo artist with the image of her fiddling away exuberantly in John Mellencamp's "Paper in Fire" video.Still, that was a lifetime ago, and since then Germano has come to occupy her own little niche. No surprise that the clouds don't part on Magic Neighbor, Germano's eighth record, or that the woozy gloom hasn't made way for sunbeams and rainbows. Even so, some of the gauze has lifted, especially compared to Germano's last couple of releases. 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....full text |
| Brainwashed |
| A new album from Lisa Germano is always a noteworthy event, as each of her periodic hiatuses has threatened to be a permanent one. Magic Neighbor, Lisa's first new album in three years, shows that an evolution has been occurring during her recent silence: an unexpected amount of light is now filtering into her creaky, melancholy, and decayed little sonic snow globes. This shift in direction, however, is still in a bit of an awkward stage. Young God In Michael Gira’s description of Magic Neighbor, he mentions that it reminds him of early Disney songs. Despite my longstanding love of Germano's work and my intense antipathy towards all things Disney, I have to agree with him a bit. This album seems like it could have been a soundtrack to a movie (perhaps about a very sensitive and lonely unicorn) that had to be scrapped because the music made all the children in the focus groups cry. This odd association is largely rooted in Lisa’s conspicuous new divergence from traditional pop song structures, as many of the songs here do not follow a regimented verse/chorus trajectory. Instead, chorus-like interludes seem to burst forth from Lisa’s murky, baroque, and eerily carnival-esque ballads at seemingly arbitrary and unexpected times. Of course, all of the things that make Germano such an endearing and idiosyncratic artist are still here: touchingly melancholy and smoky vocals, gauzy and dreamlike production, sprightly pianos tinged with sadness, and beautifully arranged strings. However, there are also several new elements that don’t quite work seamlessly yet, such as a propensity for plunging into cheery major key passages and the aforementioned diffuse structure. Also, Magic Neighbor suffers a bit from a lack of characteristic bite, dark humor, and nocturnal surrealism (though both “Suli-mon” and the title song get a bit mind-bending at times). The songs that work best are those that remain most firmly rooted in her past work, such as “The Prince of Plati” and the aching, wistful “Snow.” Much of the remainder of this rather brief album has the feel of a drifting series of interludes, so individual tracks don’t stand out much. It is rare for an artist's work to become less accessible at the same time that it becomes less emotionally uncomfortable, but that is exactly what has happened here....full text |
| Acousticmusic |
| Lisa Germano is Gothprog's Tori Amos, and her latest pretty much puts the dark icing on that cake. Where 4AD left off its neo-folksy side, she and Young God Records kinda took up, with broad swaths of Harold Budd, non-serial Michael Nyman, a depressed Penguin Cafe Orchestra, and Romanticism twisted and tweaked, then tossed everything around and marinated it grey. You knew Lisa Germano in high school. She was the nerdy girl whom no one noticed but everyone knew for her weird introverted intensity and extra-dimensional attitude. Every school had at least one, usually a few, but hardly any of 'em graduated. Germano did. Can't tell ya who's playing what—the promo copy's not exactly lavish—but Magic Neighbor is of a stripe with the off-kilter usual expected of the chanteuse: delicately elaborate, breathy, misty, nervous, bemused, and melancholy above all else. Billowing understated synths pave the skies and winds in drear Elizabethan habiliment, string sections dancing on ruffles and soiled petticoats, Germano's world weary voice exhausted with the task of living. Cocoon 's minuet is a lush affair that ends abruptly after a chamber build-up, reflecting the attenuation of depression into…what? Well, analyzing the composer's music is never a party, ambushed and latticed with labyrinths of explication and connotation, but the finale is nonetheless apt. In other hands, it's been attempted and failed miserably; here, poetry awakes and dies Dickensily in the same heartbeat....full text |
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