Nobody makes records like Lisa Germano. This music seeps into your system with a warm glow like alcohol gently working its way into the bloodstream through the lining of an empty stomach. From the first moment you're drifting weightless through Germano's gossamer world, where everything's infused with a woozy, fairytale melancholy, and maybe just a hint of the sour taste of last night's wine. Liquid Pig is beautifully and richly orchestrated, but also so intimate and saturated with a peculiar sadness (that can suddenly shift to joy or whimsy) you get the feeling you're drifting through the dreams inside her head, led along by the soft breeze of her breathing. Germano says that if you removed the breath from her voice there'd be nothing there. That particular quality is perhaps what draws you in-- the sound of a lover whispering a song or a secret in your ear. These songs are intimate, even "confessional," but they're certainly not limited to the personal. Seems that any human being with a sense of their own frailty ought to find a place for themselves in this beautiful and seductive music. Includes bonus CD of unreleased home studio and live material.
Review by Heather Phares
Lisa Germano's music has always had an out-of-time quality to it, but never more so than in the current musical climate, where toughness and a jaded attitude dominate almost every style of music. The almost complete lack of hardness -- both sonically and lyrically -- in Germano's work is both a blessing and a curse, perhaps limiting her audience but making an indelible impression on those she does reach. Her fans won't be disappointed by Lullaby for Liquid Pig, a concise but evocative album that sounds all the sweeter due to her long absence from the music scene. Once again, though, the strangely timeless quality to her music makes the long gap between Slide and this album irrelevant -- Lullaby for Liquid Pig is very much of a piece with the rest of her gently brave, individualistic work. While her music has never chased trends, the weightless, shimmering sound that Germano has pursued since Geek the Girl still manages to sound much fresher and more innovative than that of artists who reinvent their sound with every album. Like Geek the Girl, Lullaby for Liquid Pig is something of a concept album, revolving around addictions of all kinds, not just the alcoholism that the album's title obliquely alludes to. It's not so much the addictions themselves that Germano explores as the desires and delusions behind them, which she expresses beautifully on "Dream Glasses Off" and "From a Shell," a pair of songs that melt into each other and repeat the phrases, "someday someone is gonna love you" and "it's the buzz, it's the buzz," as desperate mantras. Whether it's love or alcohol, the album says, it's the same addiction to hoping that someone or something is going to save you from yourself. While Lullaby for Liquid Pig's subject matter is typically dark, on the whole the album is more like the bittersweet meditations on Excerpts from a Love Circus and Slide than the truly tormented-sounding Geek the Girl, although in the topsy-turvy world Germano creates here, the superficially happy-sounding songs carry more danger than the brooding ones. The weirdly loopy "Candy," with its bright and hazy textures, and "It's Party Time," which sounds like bubblegum pop that's been broken and reconfigured and alludes to the Troggs' "Love Is All Around" and Neil Diamond's "Red Red Wine," have a disturbingly woozy quality that sounds like sinking into a blissfully ignorant narcotic cocoon. Conversely, the album closes with a few dark yet oddly hopeful songs like "Into the Night" and "...To Dream" that suggest that some kind of happy ending is still within reach. Imparting its wisdom and melodies in fits and flashes, Lullaby for Liquid Pig is nevertheless one of Lisa Germano's most accessible works yet; with any luck more fans of challenging but beautiful music will catch up with her this time around. [In 2007,Young God issued an edition of the album that included an additional CD of bonus material.]
Lisa Germano
Lullaby for Liquid Pig
[Ineffable/ArtistDirect; 2003]
Rating: 8.5
I'd wager that most of our readers would otherwise ignore what's sure to be among the more spectral and alluring records of 2003 because its author was once a precious Lilith Fair poetess. You'll probably shiver to learn she previously made her living-- for the better part of a decade-- as John Mellencamp's violinist. In fact, I dare say most of you would mistake Lisa Germano for Meredith Brooks.
Germano, however, has certainly earned some measure of disinterest and even disdain thanks to her uncomfortably maudlin records, all wincingly breathy and for the most part bereft of focus. On her first two full-lengths, her violin playing is still saddled by the stereotypical country melodies she spun for Mellencamp's renowned backing band; her second album Happiness was a learning and chaotic affair, and didn't make much of a splash until Capitol Records allowed her to re-sequence and re-release it on 4AD (a lot of people will tell you it was remixed as well-- it wasn't).
Once on 4AD, the precociously pouting "Dresses Song" caught a college radio breeze, introducing us to her moan, which was instantly compared to Mazzy Star's Hope Sandoval. But while Sandoval had a more terrestrial timbre, Germano followed her sleeve-tugging, cutely awkward drawl into a melodramatic, overproduced and compositionally slight third album of effects-pedal atmosphere, 1994's Geek the Girl. Her most recent records-- Excerpts from a Love Circus (1996) and Slide (1998)-- hid a handful of great songs like "I Love a Snot" (fantastically remixed by one Tchad Blake) and the solemn "Wood Floors", but were beset by more incongruous, confused instrumentation.
It's an odd notion but the music is really what's detracted from Germano's increasingly excellent songwriting all these years. I have to assume she begins with lyrics, and whether or not she skirted a sound comparable to her constant critical companions Mazzy Star, on her bizarrely-titled sixth album Lullaby for Liquid Pig, she's stopped trying to work her words into traditional rock instrumentation and started building tunes around her effortless voice, tense but never breaking. Save one glaring failure-- "Liquid Pig", an underdeveloped experiment in distorted, drunken chaos-- these depressed and depressing drawing room dirges wring regret from the coldest and oldest of hearts.
The record comes into focus with "Nobody's Playing", an introduction that clearly defines a piano-scored slip into Americana, falling through memories real or imagined, recorded on stuttering kinetoscope and dug up a century later. On "Paper Doll", it seems every word is a chorus unto itself, swelling and releasing in an instant, until a multitracked passage longingly repeats, "You can always play with me," perhaps not caring whether the game is child-like, loving or destructive.
"Pearls" echoes the record's opener, and if you'll skip "Liquid Pig", it's around this time-- just ten minutes in-- that it strikes you how easily these devastating choruses come for Germano. And they aren't heavy-handed breakup anthems or fatuous VH-1 ballads calling back to tender teenage dreams-- Germano is famously adult and obscure with imagery, and continues in her tradition. As with roughly half the tracks on Lullaby for Liquid Pig, the sound of a breeze blowing across a cheap microphone is mixed in as "Pearls" ends. It could come off as a cheap device in lesser hands; I've checked my windows more than once.
This daydreamt, cinematic mode is most powerfully explored by the stumbling, bemused "From a Shell", a hugely poetic and far too brief resignation that refuses to fall into despair in the wake of personal tragedy. Without a doubt, these are Lisa Germano's finest three minutes on record, as resonant in their doleful simplicity as any feature-length post-modern melodrama.
Of the four songs that depart from near-solo accompaniment, three are successful, if not outstanding. "It's Party Time" is instantly catchy but also instantly recognizable, an unwitting, note-for-note duplication of Beat Happening's most famous tune, "Cast a Shadow"; its loose rhythm, clean production and topical similarity to UB40's "Red Red Wine" also invoke that track done at a speedy clip. "All the Pretty Lies" follows, by far the most sonically menacing piece on the record, a twisted pile of vines and dead leaves collecting in the corner of a collapsed house, leading into the shimmering strings of the title track, which isn't powerful so much as captivating as it spins away toward this brief record's hazy horizon.
Lullaby for Liquid Pig is deceptively potent; in just thirty minutes it divines your most closely held memories, guiding you farther and farther back with endless, heartbreaking choruses. Though its divergent tracks are merely distractions, the record would push either monotony or melodrama without them; they reassure us she hasn't forgotten the self-assured, sexed-up smirk that sold so many of us down her dizzy rollercoaster in the 1990s. Where she once darted past our baiting stares with coy glimpses and we'll-see winks, after ten years Lisa Germano is no longer playing in those fields, resolved, somewhat remorseful and shooting back an unwavering, crushing gaze.
-Chris Ott, April 18, 2003
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