Lisa Germano

Lisa Germano is one of the great protagonists of female singer-songwriting in the Nineties. Her albums are sonic miniatures that reveal themselves little by little, as if coated in thin layers waiting to be deciphered. Her minimal, apparently quiet stories always conceal a dramatic tension, a chilling crescendo of anguish worthy of the most "noir" songwriters of all time. Musically, her body of work echoes the most desperate ballads of Leonard Cohen and Joni Mitchell, but also the most spectral litanies of Nico, managing to combine traditional folk, alternative rock, dark blues and classical music.

A multi-instrumentalist of Italian descent, born in Indiana and raised on violin and classical music, Lisa Germano was discovered by John Mellencamp, with whom she played for several years before launching her solo career in 1991. After the experimental folk of her debut, "On The Way Down From The Moon Palace", her songwriting took on increasingly dark tones in the albums that followed. Lisa is in constant struggle with herself, with her childhood traumas, her phobias, her insecurities - ghosts she is forever trying to exorcise in a desperate act of catharsis.

"Geek The Girl" (1994) is her masterpiece. Recorded entirely at home and produced by Malcolm Burn together with Germano herself (who plays multiple instruments: guitar, keyboards, violin), it's a concept album about unhappiness steeped in dark existentialism. A woman's ordeal portrayed through small sonic panels touching on loneliness, alienation, the inability to connect with others, wounded feelings, sexual violence. Lisa Germano's tension never explodes outright, but seeps in gradually across a sequence of twilight ballads, built on the use of multiple instruments and constant sonic variations that serve to dramatize the narrative framework. Germano herself shifts between different registers, almost as if playing the various characters that crowd her nightmares. The effect is suggestively "theatrical", yet always contained within rigid minimalist boundaries.

The Italian tarantella interludes that divide the album into three parts create an estranging effect: the festive rhythm injects a forced cheerfulness into what is otherwise pure drama and pain, while at the same time heightening the "alienated" dimension of this performance, as if the protagonists were, deep down, nothing more than puppets manipulated by a dark, inescapable fate. Lisa Germano's soliloquies, with one foot in reality and the other well past the threshold of madness, are dominated by a sense of impending tragedy. The theme of a tormented childhood recurs throughout, amid psychedelic carousels, ethereal lullabies and stirring rock progressions, with her spectral violin lingering in the background to lend an ever-present note of unease. The Indiana songwriter's voice doesn't rasp like a rocker's, nor does it carry the nasal twang of a country singer. It's just a whisper, tender and velvety, wrapped in spare yet incisive arrangements.

The opening track, "My Secret Reason", for instance, is a confession of powerlessness that leaves no way out. And while the faintly dissonant lullaby of "Trouble" — yet another ferocious act of self-criticism ("And as I act I hate myself") that begins with a conventional pop structure before gradually disintegrating into a thousand rivulets — hints for a moment at calmer scenarios, "Geek The Girl" shatters every last hope: the thread of dialogue is broken, and Lisa is now lost in the black vortex of her sexual torments: "Oh oh, I'm not too cool, oh no, I'm not too cool/ Wrong move and you're not too cool/ wrong move and you're not too cool…".

The stream of consciousness of "Geek The Girl" slides into the paranoid "Cry Wolf": an anguished self-accusation ("You should have known better/ It's all your fault"), whispered by Germano over a backdrop of ethereal guitar arpeggios and muted violin moans. It's the last step before the abyss of "Psychopath", which relives the ordeal of a woman raped at home by her partner. Here we're truly in Nico's funereal territory: Lisa's voice turns childlike to intone the most chilling of lullabies ("…A psychopath, a psychopath/ he says he loves me And I'm alone/ and I am cold and paralyzed, I can't move…"), while the surreal strumming of a guitar and a woman's crying (taken from a real emergency-line call) push the tension to breaking point. Germano doesn't repress her ghosts — quite the opposite: she makes them real and recounts them in a depersonalized way, in a desperate (and futile) attempt to exorcise them.

The sinister harpsichord motif of "Sexy Little Girl Princess" certainly doesn't ease the pathos, even though this time Lisa Germano attempts the path of illusion, of fleeing from herself. The track is above all a showcase for the Indiana songwriter's arranging skills, also confirmed by the album's only fully instrumental piece, "Phantom Love", a classically-tinged mini-symphony with a solemn gait. The feverish dialogue of "Cancer Of Everything", drowned in a sea of strings, culminates in the realization of anguish as an unavoidable existential backdrop. All that's left, then, is to take refuge in an imaginary universe of love and colors (the dreamy "Of Love and Colors") or of stars (the tender melody of "Stars"). The ordeal of Lisa the Sad thus ends with a moving, dreamlike yearning that opens the heart.

"Geek The Girl" has the elegance of a collection of classical pieces and the ferocity of a (self-)psychoanalysis session. Few songwriters had gone (or will ever go) so deep in probing their own feelings, their own madness, their own defeats. And few composers, in the world of rock, have managed to weave patterns so far removed from the traditional structures of the song form without ever sacrificing the pleasantness that is characteristic of that format. A nearly perfect record, then, with only one flaw: the absence of the lyrics (an essential component of the work) from the accompanying booklet.

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30/10/2006