Albums and concerts reviews

Albums review in One Billion Robots, December 94

Anon compilation review in The War Against Silence #37, 12 October 95

Concert Review in RAD Cyberzine, 1994


The Lisa Germano Blues Explosion

Lisa Germano's violin is such a sweet-sounding instrument, but it has its brutalities. It can rasp, screech, wail. So with her voice. She sings in the voice of a small child. With each album it grows progressively softer, until by "Geek the Girl" she's down to the merest whisper. But that's irony, because the subterranean anger comes welling up at odd moments. All the stupid things that don't ever change enrage her. Off-handedly self-deprecating on the surface, Germano is going at the world with a scalpel.

Moon Palace is essentially a home-made album. Germano accompanies herself on violin, accordian, guitar, drum machine. If a song like "Guessing Game" mines a vein long since depleted by folks like Michelle Shocked, that's more than made up for by the lovely "Hangin' with a Deadman" (nice to hear the accordian taken seriously as an instrument), or "Dig My Own Grave" (which has a guitar riff worthy of Ivy Rorschach).

Happiness is a much slicker production. Germano fills out her arrangements with a full complement of backing musicians. The result is a lush, luxurious sound, a perfect backdrop for Germano to toss off her casual sarcasms. ("Ain't life fun?") Bitter though much of this album is (eg the hollow "ha ha ha" that runs through "Bad Attitude"), Germano doesn't abandon hope. The last chords of "Bad Attitude" are angelic as she whispers "Change back / to when / you laughed / easy / and all your moves / ... were ... child ... like." And then listen to her and the band stomp their way through a raucous cover of "These Boots Are Made For Walkin'." You'll want to dance.

Geek the Girl is drastically pared down; guest musicians show up on just five of the album's 12 songs. My first several listens, I was put off by this album. It didn't do what I expected. With further listens, it has opened up for me, or else I've opened up for it. "Geek" is a difficult work, dark and brooding. Germano sings about violence, abuse, about being a loser. There's not a lot of song structure here. Everything is attenuated and discordant. (eg the way "Trouble" starts out as a normal pop song played too slow, then promptly disintegrates.) The songs drift, instruments fade in and out, lapse into dissonance. Germano sounds drugged or half-asleep ("too much of this, too much of that"). Her violin scrapes along tunelessly .... But don't think for a minute that she isn't in control of her medium. She is engaged in a deliberate deconstructive act, a hatchet taken to pop conventions, both lyrical and musical. The final track ("Star") could have been something written in 1965 and then covered by Yo La Tengo on "Fakebook." But if you've followed Germano this far, you'll get the joke. C'mon everybody, sing.

(c) 1994 Mike Wasson, One Billion Robots, December 94

Various: Anon compilation

Last week, for once, my irrational urge to buy compilations, which usually results in reinforcements for my spare-jewel-case stack, yielded some collections that show both laudable effort on the parts of the compilers and the artists, and potentially enduring value. The prize, clearly, and one of the most impressive compilations I've seen in a long time, is Anon, the second benefit album assembled by Boston music/art studio Castle von Buhler for the Boston AIDS Action Committee. The first one, Soon, which came out late last year, was a striking collection of mostly Boston-area gothic hard-liners that ran very much against the usual garage-heavy current of Boston rock. The CD booklet further distinguished the compilation by pairing the credits for each song with an original illustration by a Boston or NY artist. Anon takes Soon's concept and expands on it brilliantly. The collection runs to two CDs this time, and where Soon's meticulously illustrated booklet was still part of a conventional jewel box package, Anon's packaging is a completely custom-designed gatefold cardboard apparatus holding thirty art postcards in addition to the discs. The bulk of the bands are from Boston again, with most of the contributors to Soon returning, and the artists are again predominantly East Coast, but in both cases there are several notable inclusions from outside the area. There are even three artists important enough that their credits have to mention what label they are appearing courtesy of.

The first of these is Lisa Germano, who contributes the opening song, "Angels Turn to Devils". A somber, meditative piece, with Lisa's frail singing drifting over a muted, textural keyboard backing, it's a beautiful song, and a fitting opening for the set. The card art is Cynthia von Buhler's, a complicated sculpted illustration of an angelic kissing couple, etched with obsessive repetitions of the phrase "I'm no angel", and with a butterfly embedded in one of the figures in a sort of specimen-like diorama. The tension between mystery and confrontation is strong in both Lisa and Cynthia's work, and their spirit permeates this collection.

Adam Buhler's band, sirensong, follow with "Soapbox", on which Michelle Poppleton's ethereal vocals drift over a slow foundation that is industrial in the sense that a factory for manufacturing halos would be industrial; Polly Becker's illustration is a disturbing constructed figure of a woman. Next is the awkwardly named Veronica Black Morpheus Nipple, who perform a jarringly processed, mangled thing called "Friend's Birthday", which seems like more processing than source material for the most part. The illustration, oddly, is a willfully crude Glenn Wurtz painting which either makes some point about hands and torches that I can't figure out, or else features the worst drawings of hands that I've ever seen.

NY band Cake Like is up next, with a garrulous, but brief, barrage of noise called "Billy Boy"; James Kraus' illustration is appropriately ugly. Chainsuck returns the musical mood to the gothic, with the dense, hissing "'Til My Head Explodes", accompanied by a sinister dueling collage. Discordant DC band Edsel then provides "Fortune of Space", whose contorted illustration means nothing to me. Turkish Delight's "Spin" is demented and a little inane. Lumen does the Throwing-Muses-like "Filament", whose grim lyrics match Mick Aarestrup's rough illustration of creatures plummeting into torment (or playing with big, festive pieces of red cloth beside a nice city bridge, it's kind of hard to tell).

The dolorous trudge of fade's "I Lied" is matched with a strangely suggestive device of unknown utility, by John Weber. The pace then picks up a little for Curious Ritual, whose mixture of noisy guitars with slow, methodical drumming and high, wraithlike vocals is a lot like sirensong's. Things then start to get almost catchy and accessible for Astroboy's "Posterchild" and Dmitry Gurevich's photo collage of a big ship, a statue of a warrior maiden, and a boy with a very large head. Sextiles keep things going with "I Hope You Die", a chilling song that I reviewed a while ago as a single. If the song doesn't unnerve you, a close examination of exactly where the figure in Juliette Borda's illustration has been hit with darts will. This leads to another bewitching moment, The Curtain Society's buoyant, New Wave-esque "Gravity", whose lilting chorus has convinced me to buy their album the next time I see it. The first disc then starts to wind down again with Worldseed's distracted "Confessions of a Daydream", and concludes with the bizarre XTC-on-acid of Zutrau's "To a Mouse". This song borders on unlistenable for me, but the illustration, which combines what I believe is Abraham Lincoln with a mouse that has either painted itself green and then hung itself, or else hung itself and then been painted green (by Abe?), is pretty cool.

Disc two opens with "Tuba Edit", a pulsing ambient percussion/synthesizer groove from Eardrum, illustrated by a very odd wood box featuring old fashioned anatomical illustrations of hearts and some iron phalluses with wings on them whose purpose (or significance) is not immediately apparent. Next is the set's one self-illustrated piece, a short musical interlude composed of synth washes and samples of a Tibetan sheep herder (it says) and some roosters, illustrated by a religious-looking Far-Eastern contraption adorned with jigsaw-puzzle pieces and some extraneous diodes and resistors whose crime against the artist is unspecified. Women of Sodom piece together an incomprehensible structure of samples and dub called "Boots (aka The Accountant Song)", illustrated by a particularly ominous Melissa Beck picture.

Things smooth out some for the dreamy "Splendour", by Felidae Chant, which even features some nice E-bow. The gurgling "Lips Acquire Stains" (by symbn prjct, who seem to have suffered an unfortunate name mishap since appearing on Soon as Symbion Project), however, returns to dire moods, illustrated by a very unsettling drawing of a beast who, for various reasons best not detailed, probably doesn't lead a wholly comfortable life. An oddly straightforward winged man built out of bark and feathers (okay, he does have a miniature heart impaled on a fly-fishing lure, but in the context of the rest of this set's art, wings and an impaled heart are practically naturalistic) by Susan Farrington accompanies a Cocteau-Twins-like piece by An April March. Cinnamon's "Rocketship Launch" is another conceptual soundwork, illustrated by Jordan Isip's technically inaccurate notion of where, on the head, the neck attaches. Frank Smith's "Maze" doesn't move me one way or the other, but the illustration for it, a painting by Eric White of some hideous gnarled creatures on wheels wearing black-and-white movie-star masks with no apparent regard for how unconvincing the disguises are, is one of my favorites of the set.

I also really like Bina Altera's indistinct building and nude obscured by a blizzard of birds, and the Moors' accompanying multi-ethnic dirge "Belen-Guard" is one of the collection's more impressive compositions (though I admit to having a weakness for any song that credits "haunting, wailing and channeling the Celtic pantheon" among its elements). "5 Years Later", by One of Us, is also noteworthy, even if it does have a dangerously close resemblance to NIN's "Hurt" in several places. Rabid Ear Test's "Red Is the String" is another nice ambient soundscape, though what Mark Fisher's blocky illustration has to do with it escapes me. I really like Peter Wyckoff's enigmatic four-panel meditation on the number 55, though, and there's something charming about the awkward lurch of Richard Bone's song "Overstated Papers", which reminds me pleasantly of the obscure early-Eighties band Gardening by Moonlight. (Anybody who knows what happened to them, please write.)

Eardrum squeezes in another track, the simmering "I'm Misleading", which gives Cynthia von Buhler an excuse to include another illustration where she uses overlaid writing for texture, an evil-looking spider replacing the butterfly from the earlier piece. Crank the volume for the penultimate track, so as to extract the most neighbor-worrying value from the frighteningly orgasmic grunting and moaning in Out of Band Experience's otherwise beepy "Alien Android Succubus (Droid Remix)". And the collection finally shudders to a halt with The Borg's spooky "Outer World", and Nataliya Gurshman's abstract, streaky mixture of purples and yellow-greens. If neither gothic pallor nor ambient experimentation appeal to you, probably this collection won't be to your tastes, but if you're up for a couple of hours of spirited noise from bands you've mostly never heard of, and about the coolest visual art you're likely to find in a music store, then this set has the rare virtue of never being boring, even when it's occasionally bad, and for that I'm inclined to heap upon it all the unused compilation-kudos that most of its genre peers have been busy not earning.

© 1995, Glenn Mcdonald, in The War Against Silence #37, 12 October 95

Lisa Germano: Fall 1994 Tour

In our eagerness to catch interviews with the Pale Saints and Idaho, we somehow managed to overlook the most hermetic and enduring artist of the night -- Lisa Germano. We had seen her roaming about the bar earlier in the evening, a small woman with long, careless brown hair and the face of a precocious little girl. She looked innocent enough. As she began her set following Idaho, we discovered that, despite such semblance, she had clashed with the opening band. "This first song is dedicated to Idaho," she explained, "because I'm sort of a bitch sometimes..." She then apologetically did the title track of her recent album, "Geek the Girl." (Certainly she did not come off as someone to obscure her own faults!) She performed for about forty-five minutes. The show was enigmatic at times, and never dull or contrived. In "Cry Wolf", we saw a gentle vulnerability as offset by learned cynicism. And in hearing her songs, how could anyone not believe that this girl has endured a lot of abuse?

The amazing talent of Lisa Germano lies in her ability to maintain a captive audience, even as she self-indulgently laments over relationships in "A Guy Like You" and wishes she had "Cancer of Everything." In fact, this is her charm. Her complaints run much deeper emotionally than those of more famous losers and creeps, like Beck or Radiohead. She is spontaneous and straight forward, unabashedly revealing herself. It is likely that she penetrated the egos of the few spectators that night, reminding them of their own psychoses. Lisa Germano's own world is one which permeates with psychosis; but that is honey-drenched like a lazy drug buzz that numbs the pain of life. Her deftness at the violin, with which she weaves moods of cankerous despair, sets her apart from the standard songstress, especially when wedded with the inquisitive woman-child she lyrically portrays. Even the frightening "... A Psychopath" comes across as nearly a nursery rhyme, with its simplistic Dick and Jane phrasings -- "I hear a scream. I see me scream."

For the next week after the show, I could not help but immerse myself in the sensuous melancholy of "Geek the Girl." She haunts from the deepest realms of isolation and insecurity to make even the sharpest pains soft with narcotic poetry.

© 1994, Squid, in Rational Alternative Digital Cyberzine

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