Dresden Dolls - In the theatre of punk cabaret

“Brechtian Punk-Cabaret”: this is how Amanda Palmer (voice and piano) and Brian Viglione (drums), from Boston, describe their own project. Ambitious they certainly are, and also a bit (quite a lot, actually) brazen if you will, but in fact, hearing them and especially watching them, these two unlikely East Coast pierrots have managed to create one of the most compelling and original styles to have emerged lately.

They've been around since 2001 and originally released their debut album at the end of 2003. But it took a second release almost a year later to give the group the right promotional push: and success did come, the (gorgeous) video for the single “Coin-Operated Boy” took off on the major music channels, and the duo also had the honor of opening the European shows for Nine Inch Nails. And they deserve all of their success, because through the simple, vibrant energy of their songs and their captivating live performances, they make up for plenty of the understandable naivety of a debut.

The Dresden Dolls look to post-punk, to Sparks, to more recent female singer-songwriter pop (more Fiona Apple than Tori Amos), but they look decidedly more to Marlene Dietrich, and even more to the art of pantomime: Amanda Palmer, who writes all the songs, is essentially a brash troublemaker who acts out her songs while accompanying herself on piano with raw intensity, while her inscrutable partner supports and complements her every move with precision and ease, proving himself along the way to be one of the most gifted drummers on the scene today.

Dresden Dolls boasts a couple of songs like the opening “Good Day” and “Half Jack” (probably the record's high point) that already have everything it takes to win over an audience hungry for surprises; but tracks like “Missed Me”, “Girl Anachronism” and the aforementioned single “Coin-Operated Boy” are the true manifestos of their art. Setting aside the more melancholy tone of most of the compositions, these grotesque and highly entertaining little vignettes, dropped onto us straight out of 1920s Weimar, never sit still for a moment, darting about amid pauses, restarts and stormy crescendos, sardonically driven by Amanda's sobbing vocal delivery (and live, they're capable of improvising on them in every possible way).

Faced with such antics, the songs on the second half of the record drag along a bit wearily, recycling the same tricks in a more conventional way, as the otherwise lovely “Gravity” does, or getting bogged down in slow numbers like “The Perfect Fit”, and they don't hold up to comparison: on top of that, the Dresden Dolls don't seem to possess any particular melodic gift, and thoroughly classic ballads like “The Jeep Song” suffer for it. The alluring “Slide”, however, wins us over fully once again, hitting all the right notes. And the closer, the lengthy “Truce”, is a masterpiece of dramatic tension, starting out subdued and gradually morphing into a vibrant crescendo buoyed by yet another masterful performance from Viglione on drums.

Overall, the duo still can't quite sustain the full (long) runtime of an album, but they also display an uncommon degree of personality, expressiveness and chemistry: it's definitely worth seeing the glass as half full and forgiving the sluggishness of the record's middle section, because their potential is genuinely frightening.

The habit of shaping an eyebrow into whichever flourish suits them best continues to go hand in hand with a free and playful take on the world, for the Dresden Dolls, even after the effective calling card struck by their self-titled album.

Buoyed by considerable promotional charisma, charged with a natural and peculiar energy embodied in the decadent, Brechtian mask of Amanda Palmer – a flamboyant pianist suspended between the instrument's elegance and an incandescent personality, perfectly underscored and embraced by the figure of drummer/Pierrot Brian Viglione in the background – the duo returns in 2006 with Yes, Virginia….

Pinning the record down to a single genre proves an extremely tricky task, given the sheer multiplicity of ideas and suggestions at play. What strikes you immediately is a visceral approach to the instruments, true of both Amanda's piano and Brian's drums. The setting is a sort of avant-garde little theatre lifted straight out of the Belle Époque: you'd expect a performance à-la Ute Lemper, or, reaching into the more recent past, a tragicomedy close to the biting irony of The Vanity Set, but it's none of that. Their post-punk listening habits betray an energy, a furious pounding on piano and drums, paired with vocals twisted into grotesque, terrifying grimaces, all lightened by an aestheticizing, more direct touch compared to the rawness of their forebears.

The opener immediately brings to mind the sheer vital force with which Amanda sings and plays piano, like a sudden impulse that wakes you and throws every window wide open, electrified by spring, letting in all the breeze there is ("Sex Changes") and turning the air of the house upside down with the agitated freshness of a furious voice and hyperactive drums ("Modern Moonlight").

The cabaret curtain rises on a dancer who, squeezed into a guêpière, dances around a chair with a Dietrich-like wink ("My Alcholic Friends"). If, as we approach the turning point, the tones soften into the pulsing pathos of heartbroken fragments à-la Tori Amos ("First Orgasm" and "Mrs O"), the ending returns to self-assured irony, with vocals bordering on sheer brazenness, where time is marked by the roguish ticking of piano and drums in an off-theatre setting ("Mandy Goes To Med School").

The closing track, addressed to the world, is, as the single's video tells it, a compelling invitation to sing about oneself, in every human form of expression, without abandoning the innocently grotesque grimace that underscores the pianist's astonishing facial mimicry ("Sing").

The indulgence in emotion that pervades the whole album doesn't strip it of its sense of divertissement, able to conjure up the improbable contrast between the sepia tones of old Mitteleuropean suggestions and the face of American post-modernity, letting the eyebrow keep freely tracing its own arc.

In 2008, with Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, the singer, keyboardist and co-songwriter of the group puts herself forward as a literary writer (as well as, naturally, a songwriter of considerable standing) to launch her solo career with a handful of highly personal songs. The Twin Peaks-style parallel with the anti-heroine Laura and the pseudo-generational catchphrase of the '90s ("Who killed Laura Palmer?") thus stands as a potent metaphor.

Alongside her vitalist blueprints, Amanda Palmer relies on grand arrangements, orbiting around the inseparable duo of voice and piano. Ben Folds, enlisted for the occasion, approached the job with an attitude that even verges on the overblown.

Her deafening performances come through right from the epic, booming "Astronaut" and the following "Runs In The Family", part nursery rhyme, part cinematic epic. The same goes, albeit tuned to quite different expressive registers, for "Point Of It All", "Ampersand", "Have To Drive" and "Blake Says", piano ballads sung by a monomaniacal alienated soul, while on "Strength Through Music" the songwriter wanders through abysses of apathy, and on "What's The Use Of Wond'rin?" she brushes up against new peaks of clownish histrionics. Finally, "Guitar Hero" and especially the voracious "Leeds United" stand as the finest continuation of that Brechtian hard-vaudeville of which the Dresden Dolls themselves are the supreme proprietors.

An album that's even more of a group effort than the mother band itself (besides Folds' production, there are numerous featured guests: cellist Zoe Keating, Strindberg, former Dead Kennedys member East Bay Ray, Jared Reynolds, Annie Clark), it unleashes an impenetrable swarm of anguished paranoias, dictated mostly by her voice – one of the most versatile and robust of recent years – and by the virile force of the schizoid contrasts she draws on so voluptuously.

As early as 2009, the artist returns to her never-dormant love: theatre. Together with Steve Bogart, she co-writes a piece inspired by "The Diary of Anne Frank" and the pop masterpiece In An Aeroplane Over The Sea. In 2010, she records Performs The Popular Hits Of Radiohead on Her Magical Ukulele, an EP of Radiohead covers in acoustic form, and in parallel continues the Evelyn Evelyn project with Jason Webley (which had already produced the mini-album Elephant Elephant, 2007), leading to their full-length debut, Evelyn Evelyn.

In 2011 she records the transitional "Australian" record Goes Down Under, featuring live tracks and covers. The following year the Flaming Lips want her to stand in for Erykah Badu on the cover (and accompanying video) of "The First Time Ever I Saw You", after Badu had complained about her sister's misleading appearance in the risqué video. Amanda Palmer is thus ready to record Theatre Is Evil, her true second solo effort.

The controversy that accompanies the album's release (September 2012) is a direct offspring of the singer's fervent social media activity, which she'd been engaged in ever since her 2008 debut. In this case, Palmer announces that the tour supporting the new album will be an open one: fan musicians from around the world will be able to get up on stage with their idol and play alongside her, rewarded only in beer and affection. The move sets off an uproar, with choruses of protest – including the prominent voice of Steve Albini – decrying a lack of seriousness and respect towards musicians. Palmer thus takes substantial steps back to calm things down and acknowledge her excessive trust in social media.

But the die is cast. This supposed promotional stunt definitively launches her into alternative stardom, crowning her a heroine in step with the times – no longer fragile as she was at her debut, but by now the absolute master of her own music, with a band (the Grand Theft Orchestra) and a producer at her command. Musically speaking, Theatre Is Evil is exactly that: a long excursion (thematically on a par with the old double albums of the past) built on exasperated eclecticism, electronic and hyper-technological production, poses of a seasoned diva, mainstream reductions of her trademark cabaret combined with learned, nostalgic imitations. A record that works better as a Broadway musical than as the work of an expanded band, the product of an artist now fully aware of her potential and a shrewd interpreter of the spirit of the times.

Contributions by Michele Saran ("Who Killed Amanda Palmer?", "Goes Down Under", "Evelyn Evelyn", "Theatre Is Evil")

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