No Elephants (CD)


Lisa Germano

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Amoeba Review

02/11/2013

Lisa Germano continues to delve into strange, dark places on her latest album, No Elephants. She maintains the singular style of gothic folk of records like her classic 4AD Record Geek the Girl while stripping things down until they’re at their starkest, as on the title track, which consists of little more than Germano, a single piano and tape hiss. But Germano’s voice can still make your hair stand on end, as when she sings “I take it all back” like a desperate lover on the title track. Lyrically, she fascinates with acute specificity, imbuing seemingly unrelated words and images with meaning through her breathy voice and eerie atmospherics: “Four stomachs, throw up, start over … hogwash, bulldozer, way out of order” she sings in childlike, Gertrude Stein-esque chants on “Ruminants.” Musically, things on No Elephants are always more interesting than their picturesque surface would initially suggest. Strange sounds whirl beneath the veneer of the circular arrangement of “Apathy and the Devil,” and “Back to Earth” journeys into the atonal, even as it sounds culled from some warped musical. And Germano remains as adept at utilizing found sound and samples as she was when she famously incorporated a 9-1-1 call into her early song “…A Psychopath,” adding bird sounds to “Ruminants” and glitching phone noise to the instrumental “Haunted” and using it as a backbeat for “Dance of the Bees.” With little left to prove at this point, Germano goes her own way on No Elephants and ends up with one of her most intriguing releases in years.

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Track Listing



Disc 1 Titles
Artist
Length
1.
Ruminants 		Lisa Germano 03:19
2.
No Elephants 		Lisa Germano 04:24
3.
Apathy and the Devil 		Lisa Germano 02:37
4.
Back to Earth 		Lisa Germano 01:39
5.
Haunted 		Lisa Germano 02:51
6.
A Feast 		Lisa Germano 03:24
7.
Up In the Air 		Lisa Germano 02:44
8.
Dance of the Bees 		Lisa Germano 02:05
9.
Diamonds 		Lisa Germano 03:38
10.
...And So On 		Lisa Germano 02:30
11.
Last Straws For Sale 		Lisa Germano 03:21
12.
Strange Bird 		Lisa Germano 02:38

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