By Chuck Campbell
The Knoxville News-Sentinel | September 20, 1996
Gone is the woman who longed for “cancer of everything” so she could get attention, and in her place is a woman singing about love on “Excerpts From a Love Circus.”
But while most love songs assign specific emotions to the protagonist, Lisa Germano’s are fitfully complex – so much so that love seems more like a psychological disorder than a healthy emotion.
That explains “Beautiful Schizophrenic”—a song both soothing and disquieting as uneasy strings support Germano’s musings about “a couple of schizophrenics trying to figure out which one is which.”
Sounding like a breathless child with a spacey, sing-song delivery, Germano presides over some problematic proceedings.
On “Bruises” she gives herself a soft fiddle foundation for lines such as “Coffee in the morning and wine in the evening/And everything else is boring, boring… You are a nothing/But all I can think of is you.” She delivers a backhanded tribute with clangy support on “I Love a Snot,” but her relative cheerfulness fades into unsettling gloom on “Forget It, It’s a Mystery” (“I liked it when you hurt me/Forget it, its a mystery”).
Her spirits are up again on the tropical, flute-supported “Small Heads” as she sings “The world revolves around you/But it revolves around me, too”; however, when she’s told “You’re not my Yoko Ono” on the Mideastern-flavored “Lovesick,” you’d think no one could have said anything more cruel.
Germano shakes out of her malaise by advising the disillusioned to “learn to love yourself,” yet her vulnerability returns to the surface on the piano-driven “Messages From Sophia” as she begs “Would you just carry my home?” Then she appropriately closes the album with “Big Big World”: “Got a big, big heart/A big broken heart/In a big, big world.”
Loaded with surreal music, Germano’s sonic dreamscapes are sad and beautiful. They don’t amount to a package as haunting as “Geek the Girl,” but that would be a nearly impossible achievement.
Featured Image: Lisa Germano gives up the “Geek.”
