Slide

Are you up or down? Waves of information make you realize you can go to ANOTHER PLANET of waves that suit you… but only you can let go of the familiar.

In 1998, Slide became Germano’s fourth and final album on 4AD. She had been consistently busy throughout the decade, releasing new music almost every year while regularly touring. When she wasn’t on tour, she was writing new songs at home in Bloomington, Indiana.

To prepare for the release of Slide, 4AD encouraged her to meet with new producers and musicians and work with them out in Los Angeles. Open to trying something new, Germano ended up finding an apartment and got to work.

“When you’re so used to feeling dead all the time, it takes a while to get used to feeling alive. That’s kinda why it’s called Slide, because you’re wanting to be in an upper place but you keep falling back down because that’s what you’re used to. It’s really just been within the last few months that I really feel super-uplifted. When I was making the record, I was going down and up a lot.”

— Lisa Germano, Magnet Magazine (August 1998)

Slide brought a fuller, band-oriented sound to her introspective songwriting. The songs were beautifully mixed by friend and producer Tchad Blake, and the album is widely considered one of the most accessible or radio-friendly of all of Germano’s catalogue.

Once the album was completed, Germano was looking forward to touring in order to support it. It was then that she received a call and invitation to join Smashing Pumpkins on the upcoming tour for their album, Adore. Although initially hesitant, a personal call from Billy Corgan convinced Germano to pursue the opportunity, ensuring her that it would be a collaborative arrangement.

Germano then packed up her things, sublet her apartment in Los Angeles, relocated her beloved cats back home to Indiana, and set off for a month of rehearsals in Chicago and London only to eventually receive a call from Corgan’s team the night before the first show that she was no longer needed.

With no real explanation on the sudden change of direction, a confused Germano traveled back to Indiana to pick up the cats and eventually back to Los Angeles.

Slide saw release in the fall of 1998 and like all of her records, received warm praise from critics, but didn’t fare well commercially. Due to the lackluster sales, 4AD had no choice but to drop her from their roster.

Despite the setback of not having a label any longer to support her music, Germano promoted Slide through a small tour of shows and continued to provide musical support to other artists’ projects while working part-time at Book Soup, a West Hollywood bookstore. But her future as a recording artist remained an uncertainty.

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No.	Title	Length
1	Way Below the Radio	4:15
2	No Color Here	4:29
3	Tomorrowing	3:59
4	Electrified	4:46
5	Slide	2:22
6	If I Think of Love	3:03
7	Crash	4:23
8	Wood Floors	4:03
9	Turning Into Betty	4:22
10	Guillotine	3:52
11	Reptile	3:35

Slide balances Germano’s established intimacy with a more structured and expansive sound. “Way Below the Radio,” is the album’s opener, a thumping, hypnotic number that builds to a satisfying, hazy chorus. Other songs like “Tomorrowing” and “Crash” bristle with energy, while the title track and the lovely “Guillotine” offer meditative, eerie stillness. “Wood Floors,” a piano-laden ballad, is perhaps one of the best songs Germano has ever written.

Packaging & Design

Like many 4AD releases, Slide featured beautiful packaging and thoughtful design. Released in a standard jewel case, the album featured photography by Matthew Welch and wad designed by Paul McMenamin.

Additional Versions

Personnel

Critical Reception

Slide received mostly favorable reviews.

Name almost any under-recognized artist and someone will say that if he or she were only marketed correctly or heard by the right people, a star would be born. It’s hard to imagine anyone making that claim about the under-recognized Lisa Germano, whose songs are so personal, ambiguous, and unsettling that even sympathetic listeners can find it hard to gain entry.

Still, Slide is one of the more accessible albums in Germano’s catalog, lacking both the harrowing sexual dramas of Geek the Girl and the overt self-loathing of Happiness. The songs here feature Germano’s trademark carnival-music textures, but are both subtler and prettier than usual, which sometimes makes them even more disturbing: “No Color Here” and “Crash,” both about depression, are so tender and closely observed they’re nearly fetishistic.

Elsewhere, Germano lets some air into her universe: the lilting “Electrified” remembers a time when “playing was everything,” “Wood Floors” is a beautiful piano ballad, and “Turning Into Betty” is a darkly humorous song about the fear of turning into one’s mother. Even Germano’s lighter moments are disorienting, though; when she sings “I’m giving in to beauty,” it sounds less like an epiphany than a potentially fatal error.

— Kristi Coulter, AllMusic

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