LISA GERMANO - Magic Neighbor

Lisa Germano, the wonderful Lisa, a supremely gifted songwriter and keeper of unforgettable songs – some of which also came from her penultimate album, "In A Maybe World" – dives back in (and by now she does so on a roughly three-year cycle, see also the release of "Lullaby") into the rock recording cosmos with "Magic Neighbor". This time the quality drops noticeably, not helped by songs that, while not exactly out of place or incoherent, are hardly thrilling.

Much of the album seems written with a pseudo-pedagogical air that clashes with her typical inner conflict, leaving the songs rudderless. "To The Mighty One" is split between a vague tribute to late-period solo Bozulich and an overloaded bolero; "Simple", driven by acoustic guitar, retreats into her usual chamber-pop trinkets; the lullaby of "The Prince Of Plati" echoes the darkest side of Rickie Lee Jones (at best filling it with phantasmagoric arrangements). The charming experiment of "Suli-Mon", with its snake-charmer gait and doubled siren vocals, is an end in itself. "Painting The Doors" flounders in effects-laden sounds without a biting melody.

In any case, the title track and, above all, "Snow" bring back - if only in fleeting touches - that wonderful unease of years past.

Squeezed, almost crushed, between Scylla and Charybdis ("Marypan" and "Cocoon", her two new cats, somewhat as with "Excerpts From A Love Circus", whose intensity is in any case not even approached here), the album disappoints right down to its core. Before, she sang of pressing boredom, and it was tender; now she sings of love, and becomes tedious. What was once day-to-day unease treated as a matter of life and death, lofty inspiration and psychoanalytic travail, now exists as a mere dedication to relationships gone sour. The Germano-and-instrument pairing (piano, above all, or acoustic guitar) remains at the center of her world, that big big world she used to long for with the tone of a touched and touching child. Perhaps she has grown up, even if not yet fully aware of it, and the music now serves as a personal vehicle; the arrangements (at times extremely sophisticated) as mere decorations, absent-mindedly applied.

On her second album for Young God – and eighth overall excluding EPs and collaborations, the most recent chronologically being her work with Neil Finn and his 7 Worlds Collide ("The Sun Came Out"; EMI, 2009) – the singer from Mishawaka finally settles into the role of schoolmistress.

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23/09/2009