Excerpts From A Love Circus

This 1996 release was the first Lisa Germano album I bought, and I must say, it took some getting used to. But after a while, I got addicted to her music, and now I own all of her stuff. "Geek the Girl" is still my favourite album by her, but this one is brilliant as well. This album includes various "styles", and sounds "happier" than her previous work, and what she has done since. Her lyrics, though, still sound as depressed as ever. My favourite Lisa song, "Small Heads" is included on this album, plus the ultimate love song for the cynical, "I Love A Snot". Other stand-out tracks are "Forget It It's A Mystery", "Victoria's Secret", "We Suck" and "Baby On A Plane", which all make this a Cd worth buying.

Lisa Germano makes exactly the kind of music you would LEAST expect from John Mellencamp's former violinist: Moody (moody must be part of the job description for the 4AD label) and usually slow songs that discuss events in the life of a passive slacker waif. It's hard to believe Germano, who as always plays a variety of instruments, is the loser that she keeps singing about. This album is listenable throughout, and has some nice moments, but isn't in the same league with her last two albums, "Happiness" and "Geek the Girl." If you're new to Germano, go with one of those instead. The songwriting here isn't as consistent, and there's more self-indulgence, such as snippets of her cat yowling between tracks. The best song here is "I Love a Snot", about the boyfriend who makes her believe she's tubby and ugly. Also good are "Victoria's Secret" and "We Suck", which seems to be about her ex-boyfriend introducing his new girl.

The second of Germano's brilliant song cycles, 'Excerpts From a Love Circus' is a moving, if disturbing, meditation on love and pain that is, by turns, Sylvia Plath and Sylvie Vartan. It is the tension between such polarities that makes Germano's music so haunting. A self-indulgent adolescent sense of teen-weltschmerz mixed with a brilliant gift for morbid tunefulness, mordant turns-of-phrase, and a voice that is one part wounded child, three parts arch-ironist. Just as no other contemporary artist combines the pop-form and confessional lyric quite as scathingly and - and this adds to her strength - wilfully selfindulgently, no one else manages her unnerving combination of gypsy rhythms, tacky pop, muted-thrash, and folk-tinged melodicism. Comparisons are unreliable, though useful, but for complexity of rhythms, and sheer herky-jerky dynamism in juxtaposing ideas, this is somewhere between the first Throwing Muses album and Lydia Lunch's Queen of Siam'. Vocally, the voice has enough wounded innocence to it to remind of Anita Lane, Nick Cave's ex, while, lyrically, the comparison to Plath is apposite. There is a strong degree of theatricalising of the self here, projecting a persona of pained, but bored, selfconsciousness, though enlivened by a nice line in self-deprecation.

My favourite aspect of this album, and of 'Geek the Girl' that preceded it, is the wilfull determination to turn what could have been quite catchy little commercial tunes into something perversely other. The wonderful 'Lovesick', and the charming, if nasty, 'I Love A Snot', are deliberately rescued from the threat of serious unit-shifting by alienating instrumentation and, in the case of the former, a wonderful middle-eight tribute to Yoko Ono. The loveliest song on the album is catchily titled 'We Suck' and extols the utter suckiness of true love. This album is perhaps not as disturbing as 'Geek the Girl', lacking the tape of domestic violence playing under a meditation on her own psychotic stalker, but, part-soap opera, part operatic psychodrama, it is still the perfect distillate of the society that produced, or poisoned, her.