The
Dresden Dolls Studio Debut
Culturedose.net
by Brian Block
I’ve
never met Dresden Dolls’ pianist-singer-songwriter
Amanda Palmer, so I can’t tell you what
kind of person she is. She writes vivid first-person
songs, so I can’t prove you wrong if you
choose to hear the Dresden Dolls as a monomaniacal
series of diary entries: the intimate day-by-day
thoughts of a hermaphroditic hooker who cuts
herself, keeps an automated boyfriend on her
shelf, and has a deep ongoing obsession with
her most recent ex. But that would be dull,
so I’d ignore you.
It’s
not, mind you, that hermaphroditic hookers who
cut themselves, keep automated boyfriends, and
obsess over their exes have any less right to
self-expression than anyone else on white-person
radio. It’s that diary is such a limited
art form, turning a six-billion-person planet
into a hazy and poorly-lit backdrop for the
eternal question “But what about ME?”.
Instead, every non-musical element of the Dresden
Dolls indicates that it is a work of imagination
and theater – starting with the duo’s
name and the front cover, where drummer Brian
Viglione does everything in his power to look
like Joel Grey in Cabaret.
Not
that Cabaret was exactly an endorsement of the
1930’s German night scene and its celebration
of decadence: for one thing, it’s the
most subtly terrifying treatment of the Nazi
rise to power that I’ve seen in film.
But much of what made its cabaret chilling was
the ease with which it built itself on jolly
stereotypes, and could make those stereotypes
cruel if it seemed convenient to do so.
Whereas
Amanda inhabits her narrators with depth and
intensity: she builds a small universe of people,
and for a song she sings _as if_ they were her,
with the self-analytical detail of Alanis Morissette
and with Ani DiFranco’s magical ability
to make thoughts flow out of her mouth in rhyme.
The Nazis played funny games of abusing the
odd people, and then brought the sport out into
the world; Amanda Palmer sings along with the
losers, more intently than most of them would
sing for themselves, and provides a typed lyric
sheet so you can do the same.
*************
It’s the breakup songs that will get them
on radio if anything will. The upside of navel-gazing
is that, beyond the innie-outie distinction,
most navels look a lot alike: in mapping the
contours of your narrator’s wounded pride
and rage, you can satisfy a million listeners
that it was theirs you were looking at. “Good
Day” starts the album in musically simple
mode: Palmer’s piano rumbles slowly in
minor keys, Viglione uses his drum-set sparely,
and we mostly hear the part of Palmer’s
vocal range that is rounded, contralto, and
seems near tears, like Polly Jean Harvey singing
the role of a 250-pound carnival barker who
just had a fight with his wife. Late in the
song she shows off Rachmaninoff-ish chops, and
guest Ad Frank contributes the album’s
lone guitar solo, but we’re here for the
sentiments. It's the “I Will Survive”
genre, where the singer proclaims that no, really,
I’m having just a lovely time in your
absence and you didn’t hurt me and I really
don’t even think about you anymore you
unforgivably vicious heart-thieving bastard
you. What's special is Palmer’s writing
ability: how many people who do keep diaries
would love to adopt quatrains like “Go
ahead and talk about your bad day/ I want all
the details of your pain and misery/ that you
are inflicting on the others/ I consider them
my sisters and I want their numbers”?
Or the simpler “But I’d love to
have you up to see the place/ I’d like
to do more than survive, I’d like to rub
it in your face”?
People
drawn in by “Good Day” would have
a couple more breakup songs to keep them happy,
gentler ones for less mean moods. “Jeep
Song” is light and syncopated with odd
vocal harmonies (all voices by Palmer) and neat
pounding snares: Ben Folds could imitate it
without straining. It’s about being nostalgic
at the sight of the ex’s auto: “I
guess it’s just my stupid luck/ that all
of Boston drives that same black f---ing truck”.
“Truce” is long and hushed, its
drama built through roiling cymbals, a well-arranged
string quartet, and an increasingly tribal pound.
Its conciliations are born frozen: as fanciful
as “You can have Washington, I’ll
take New Jersey/ you can have London but I’ll
take New York City”, as relevant as “You
get Rte. 2 between Concord and Lexington/ I
want Mass Ave. from the Square to my apartment”,
as harsh as “On special occasions we’ll
split between parents/ who forced us to hate
them on alternate weekends”.
Sure,
it’s the last song, and followed by a
brief crackle of vinyl (or wax cylinder?) as
an old lady chides “Amanda! You're telling
us a fairy tale”. But like the giggly
23 seconds of a capella that my disc times from
the negative-24-second mark of track two, that
interlude waits its turn, and doesn’t
disrupt the howls of “I hit back when
hit, and attack when attacked”.
As
long as I’m pretending to market the Dresden
Dolls, I’ll suggest “Girl Anachronism”
as a follow-up single: its appeal won’t
be as universal as “Good Day”s,
but it deserves to be an outsider anthem. After
a few relaxing Debussy-ish arpeggios, Palmer
shrieks “1, 2, 3, 4!” over cymbal,
and begins to pound her piano hard. The vocals
are frantic, fast, and articulate enough to
amaze the finest of rappers, even as they carry
a melody the late cabaret composer Bertold Brecht
would be proud of. Spitting out the emphasis
on every third word, she spins future AOL profile
quotes from the start: “You can tell by
the scars on my arms, and the cracks in my hips,
and the dents to my ear, and the blisters on
my lips, that I’m not the carefullest
of girls”. It takes on a more theatrical
lilt for “If I were any colder I would
disengage/ if I were any older I would act my
age/ but I don’t think that you’d
believe me/ it’s not the way I’m
meant to be/ it’s just the way the operation
made me”.
I
don’t know how many would copy her when
she’s singing “I am not so serious/
this passion is a plagiarism” to almost
the tune of “I am the very model of a
modern major general”. But very soon the
yelps and venom return, and the only real question
is on whom the narrator is focusing her hate:
“You can tell from the full-body cast/
that you’re sorry that you asked/ though
you did everything you could/ like any decent
person would” is harsh as absolutions
go.
But
these isolated quotes don’t do justice.
What’s awesome is the speed with which
she barrels down her labyrinth of blame and
self-dissection, pausing not a second if she
retraces her path once or twice. Like a shark,
her narrator must stay in motion or die. Lots
of us boys will date a shark, if she’s
spirited and pretty enough; lots of girls would
rather be dangerous than endangered by others.
*************
“Missed Me”, speaking of which,
winds its logic as carefully, to a slow oompah
beat, as “Girl Anachronism” does
recklessly. It’s a perverse but undeniable
take on the Spice Girls’ version of Girl
Power, which never selected clothes for warmth
or comfort: “Missed Me”’s
girl narrator maneuvers an adult male into a
sexual relationship with childlike syllogism.
“Missed me, missed me, now you gotta kiss
me/ if you kiss me, mister, you must think I’m
pretty/ if you think so, mister, you must want
to f---- me/ if you f--- me, mister, that must
mean you love me/ if you love me, mister, you
would never leave me/ it’s as simple as
can be”. This Girl knows her Power; “why
do you keep leaving?” isn’t even
asked until she’s already pointed out
“I might tell my sister/ if I tell her,
mister, she might tell my mother/ and my mother,
mister, she might tell my father/ he won’t
be too happy, and he’ll have to call his
lawyer”. And yet even power games have
their tragedies, when they spin from emotions,
and she’ll visit him in the penitentiary
if he misses her. How can she be the carefullest
of girls when the care she wants is illegal?
So
it goes, as Amanda Palmer leaves no emotional
implications untouched. The hermaphrodite’s
song is nakedly miserable, just above a whisper,
and focuses on identity and fear instead of
the gory biology. The self-blaming “Perfect
Fit” offers sensible theories of how school
success was a setup for life failure. “Bad
Habit”’s narrator, over cinematic
piano like Tori Amos turning “Precious
Things” into the Muppet Movie finale,
has a dozen rationalizations for cutting herself,
and as many reasons why she’s superior
to a world where “No one cares if your
back is bleeding/ they’re concerned with
their hair receding”.
“Coin-Operated
Boy”’s ad for “love without
complications galore” has bouncy syncopation,
music box, and snare taps like a plastic drummer
in an Energizer commercial. Until, that is,
it flows into a plea for real love raw enough
to scare Melissa Etheridge: I can easily imagine
that the song’s first draft didn’t
have “This bridge was written to make
you feel smittener”, but by the time she’s
done following that impulse in her richest,
deepest, saddest voice, only a true scoundrel
would turn the narrator down. (But there’s
plenty of those, so she creates a rather amazing
transition back to that bouncy coin-operated
boy ad, over which Brian’s percussion
sounds like an angry trash-compactor tearing
up its room.)
***********
Palmer designed the album booklet herself, a
richly imaginative collage of paintings and
photographs and note-paper and century-old ads,
with recurring images of pre-modern children
and heavily made-up Amanda and Brian. It doesn’t
look like the work of a mental case. It looks
like the work of a creative overachiever who
thinks it’s cute to photograph the decapitated
head of a dowdy plastic doll, floating in a
tea cup on an expensive table. Oddly, she's
right.
Of
course, I’m also hoping the very-cute
kiss photos of the duo are more real than staged,
so we can see my bias. The Dresden Dolls is
the finest debut album I’ve heard since
Tori Amos and Rise Robots Rise eleven years
ago. It’s my favorite Boston-area album
since Count Zero’s Robots Anonymous, and
granting that came out only two years ago, I
proclaimed it “the best album of our young
century”. The Dresden Dolls might be the
first cd from anywhere to make me reconsider.
I
can’t believe _everything_ here is an
act – “Slide” is the creepiest
poem about aging I can even imagine, and once
she's expressed the same fears differently in
“Gravity”, I really do figure Amanda
will spend her 30th birthday locked in a tiny
metal box, breathing through a vent and sobbing.
But I want her to be basically sane. She deserves
to be as happy as she is brilliant; she deserves
that all her traumas be a healthy creative release.
I
bet that my hopes for her are, on balance, fulfilled.
If you doubt me, great: order the album from
Amazon, enjoy it, and we’ll discuss.
Recommended:
Yes
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