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Lullaby for Liquid Pig

by

Lisa Germano

 
Lullaby for Liquid Pig
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Average: 3.5 (54 ratings)

Listen close to Germano sigh these tales of madness and you can almost smell the booze on her breath.

  • We Say...

    Review by Paul Moody

    As always with Lisa Germano, the questions start early. How does a sultry former violinist for (cough) John Mellencamp have the capacity to reach such icy depths? Which part of Narnia were the vocals recorded in? And what, exactly, is Johnny Marr doing here?

    Opener “Nobody’s Playing” finds us washed ashore on a Gothic desert island where the natives are hostile and the plotline is written by Edgar Allen Poe. “Circles and circles/ Places to drown/ All that you feel is that you’re going down” she intones over undulating piano, clearly far from home.

    The puzzles continue with “Paper Doll.” When she murmurs, “You can always play with me” over and over, the message is indistinct: is she wooing a prospective lover, or submitting to their will? Are we in a fantasy or a nightmare?

    If the claustrophobic rattle of “Lullaby” suggest the latter, the mesmeric “Pearls” makes Germano’s state of mind clear: “Hate will grow/ With your alcohol glow/ Get used to the show,” she sighs. Bleak stuff, unquestionably, yet Germano instills these tales of everyday madness with a passion to match any of the opiated works on the shelves of Book Soup, the cult Hollywood bookstore where she used to work.

    Fortunately, her way with a tune makes such inquiries irrelevant. She’s abetted by the presence of both Neil Finn and Marr — on Optigan and guitar respectively — but the psychedelic trip-hop of “Candy” suggests she needn’t spend her entire life being compared to a suicidal Liz Phair. “From a Shell” is something else again, a woozy underwater classic sure to light up the charts in Atlantis. “It’s Party Time" sees her don a grass skirt for a burst of Dayglo sunset pop. Yet in Germano’s world there’s always a hangover to face, and never a trace of a Hollywood ending.

    “Close your eyes/ Not a pretty sight/ And you know what?/ It’s not gonna be all right,” she groans in "Into the Light." Harrowing transmissions from a ghostly radio station in a parallel universe? Or a songwriter of depth and knowledge, straining for a plain beyond commerciality? Lullaby For Liquid Pig leaves us guessing until the end. The singer once joked the album should have been called Alcoholics Anonymous. Listen close to Germano sigh these tales of madness and you can almost smell the booze on her breath.

  • They Say...

    Review by Heather Phares, All Music Guide

    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.

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