Lisa Germano

Magic Neighbor

(Young God)

Record Review by Adam McKibbin

Lisa Germano has become a remarkably solid bet as a solo artist.  When her backstory is invoked, it’s often to mention the surprise of seeing the fiddler from John Mellencamp’s jubilant “Paper In Fire” evolve into one of the more melancholy singer/songwriters around, her songs carrying a hazy mixture of deep despair and distant daydreams.  Of course, it would probably be more surprising – and certainly sadder – if someone from John Mellencamp’s band in the mid-to-late ‘80s was still writing songs that sounded like “Paper In Fire.”  If anything, Germano’s albums are quite unsurprising these days; Magic Neighbor is every bit a natural continuation from her beautiful and beguiling In the Maybe World (2006) and Lullaby for Liquid Pig (2003).  Who needs surprise departures when you have such a perfectly developed sense of place?

Magic Neighbor unfurls with the soft, pretty instrumental “Marypan” – for whatever darkness lurks at the heart of Germano’s material at times, it’s never at the expense of warmth.  When we first hear her a track later (“To the Mighty One”), she at first sounds far away – underwater, maybe, or perhaps even being beamed from space (there are some vaguely sci-fi noises buried in the background, like an effect on the chorus that sounds either like a UFO or a firework zooming across the sky).  Then the arrangement swells and her voice comes clean over the speakers, right in your ears and living rooms, singing of a beautiful day. 

Further down the line, the wistful instrumental “Kitty Train” picks up the escapist thread from its predecessor, “Simple,” and then plunges back into the real world of relationships on “The Prince of Plati,” in which Germano makes like the Joker (“Hey, why so serious?” she sings).  If you’re so downtrodden that you make Lisa Germano write you a song about cheering upand carpe diem, then… yeah, it’s time to let the sun shine a little.  But thanks for inspiring good material.

The brief album – which wraps up after just over a half hour – concludes with plenty of momentum.  The almost upbeat melody and wordless chants of “Suli-mon” weave into the subconscious as much as anything on the album, while “Snow” is Germano at her sparse and emotional best.  In his press notes for Magic Neighbor, Young God owner Michael Gira writes of his worry that Germano had hid herself away for so long after In the Maybe World that… well, who knows?  Her albums seem so connected to the dreamlike state that it seems completely plausible that someday she’d just float away altogether.  Hopefully, though, we’re a long way from waking up to that reality.