An accomplished singer-multi-instrumentalist first spotlighted as a member of John Mellencamp's
touring band in the late '80s and early '90s, Lisa Germano has recorded and toured with a diverse
legion of rock and pop stars including Eels,
David Bowie, Crowded House, Philip Selway (Radiohead) and Giant Sand. Yet the Indiana-born Germano is better known to a worldwide fan cult
for a series of savagely honest and musically intrepid solo albums that commenced in the early '90s for the 4AD label, including the melancholy
Happiness in 1994 and the sexual-warfare-running-amok Geek the Girl, also from '94. A series of follow-up records found her exploring with
widening musical palettes some of the farther reaches of the scary rock-as-catharsis world.
no elephants is Lisa GermanoÕs new album. Like its predecessors, it is not easy listening. Even so,
this is a deeply felt music whose dulcet charms, when scratched, reveal an ineffable glow. While GermanoÕs lyrics can be forcefully literal, theyÕre also
gratifyingly figurative; as pure music, her songs offer a resonantly oblique time and place. Such a feeling resounds on the opening track, ÒRuminants,Ó
a pensive lullabye that has, Germano says, something to do with the natural order to this world that the human race has messed up, especially in how
we treat animals and the earth itself.
The title track occupies a minor-key space where Germano watches Òthe world getting filled
up with a lot of nothingÓ ÐÐ a song, she says, about being displaced and not seeing oneÕs own worthÉAnd then thereÕre the bees, she says,
whose magical dance of pollination is being challenged by the interfering vibrations of the digital non-communication devices we humans clutch
so fiercely to our quivering breasts. We ought to take that song at face value at first, then speculate on its particulars: alienation, identity, a
troubling new view of humanity.
Questions always, values, morals, ethics, beliefs: The very close listener
could attempt to boil GermanoÕs complexities down and say that her songs, well, theyÕre about feelings. She wishes to probe her self and those she loves in a
cathartic, cutting way; she seeks as well to comfort. A handful of evocative instrumental interludes (ÒHauntedÓ) may have arisen strictly from her unconscious.
ThereÕs a song called ÒBack to EarthÓ that is delicacy defined (ÒFraidy catÉI need someone to take me homeÓ). ÒA FeastÓ: Should she bite the hand of the pigs that feed her?
Germano strives toward simple communication, but she knows thatÕs simply not possible. She flows musical metaphors,
songs that position piquant chords and textures to paint one straightforward scenario even as it becomes a metaphor for another. A track entitled ÒApathy and the DevilÓ
decries joykillers: ÒAs I feel my heart receding / they love to watch me stop believing.Ó ÒAnd So OnÓ condemns the torture of animals, a crime that follows us in life.
Each piece is finely shaded with the unexpected, things that couldn't be contrived in a formal writing process, like the wordless ÒDance of the Bees,Ó another
expressively in-between terrain plagued with locusts of noise from the electronic gear we accumulate to aid our ÒcommunicationÓ with others, and with ourselves. In
ÒDiamondsÓ GermanoÕs subconscious executes new tonal structures; we are all alchemists when we make something beautiful out of something ugly.
ÒWhen IÕm gone in my head / cover me.Ó We belong to ourselves, and we all belong together,
and we are all pretty strange, comes right down to it. And pre-, post-, in the middle, nowhere, everywhere, the mental states and emotional planes
Lisa Germano evokes smoke with intensity of feeling, at minimum the intensity of trying to remember how to feel. In ÒLast Straws for Sale," how lonely
it is when there are none left to buy:
