There's glum, and then there's Lisa Germano glum, a sort of wry reaction to bearing the heavy weight of the world mingled with the realization that life might not get much better. It's not totally without hope, but it is the weary sound of real life pressing down from all sides, unfiltered through the usual irony and dramatic stylistic flourishes. It's often not exactly fun, either, and while Germano may rue the comparison, it's hard to jibe her work as a solo artist with the image of her fiddling away exuberantly in John Mellencamp's "Paper in Fire" video.
Still, that was a lifetime ago, and since then Germano has come to occupy her own little niche. No surprise that the clouds don't part on Magic Neighbor, Germano's eighth record, or that the woozy gloom hasn't made way for sunbeams and rainbows. Even so, some of the gauze has lifted, especially compared to Germano's last couple of releases. With her piano and vocals at the fore, Germano finds plenty of room to toy with the arrangements, filling the empty corners of each song with small but sympathetic sonic details and a warmth and playfulness that she's not always transmitted from her occasionally spectral remove.
"Marypan", an instrumental, begins like an overture, its questioning melody the perfect introduction to Germano's warped but not unwelcoming world. "To the Mighty One" features Germano teetering between childlike wonder and grown-up melancholy, the tonal unease enhanced by wobbling organ, piano, and what sound like outer space effects beamed in from the margins of the mix. "Simple" continues this exploration of contrast, its almost bluesy beginning giving way with little warning to a sprightly carnival waltz. Following "Kitty Train", another wistfully evocative instrumental interlude, "The Prince of Plati" resumes the bittersweet dance of innocence and experience, with Germano occupying a tough to pin down (but no less effective) emotional ambivalence summed up by the deceptively paradoxical line "You seem so unhappy; I can't take that today." Which leaves Germano feeling... where? Up? Down? It's unclear, but it's intriguing, as is Germano's decision to bury her already mumbled, muffled, and eventually manipulated mantra-like vocals in "Suli-mon" until she's just another layered exotic instrument.
Things are more clear on "Snow", where what could be Germano's feet pumping at the pedals of her piano comes across like a distant heartbeat, and Germano herself sounds almost like she's singing her near-whispered vocals right into your ear. Elsewhere, the swirling Omnichord of "Painting the Doors", with its surreal lyrics, may be no less strange and mysterious than the purr of a cat, but they're just as inexplicably comforting. This occasionally awkward intersection of intimacy and elusiveness pervades the disc, just as it pervades Germano's other high-wire-act works, but this time the end effect is oddly inviting. It's almost as if we're being allowed a glimpse into a blurry movie flickering away in Germano's head, projected sans subtitles and its plot obscured, yet somehow no less affecting for it.
