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Rating: It would be interesting to take the trouble to recount the genesis of this album starting from a very distant point. Surely, not starting from her former (?) group (The Dresden Dolls) or the tumultuous dispute with RoadRunner, but for example from the birth of her Blog (about 4 years ago) and the related newsletter, to which I subscribed without realizing that I would be involved in bi- (and sometimes tri-)weekly updates. It would also be interesting to analyze the "Kickstarter" phenomenon (which she joined) but since boredom is looming, I will limit myself to referring you to this fairly exhaustive article, of which I just want to emphasize the phrase “As they say: the girl has worked hard, a lot. And she didn't give up after the first months, not even when there were people who treated her a bit like a digital freak.”
So I'll just talk about this album (her third solo): after the debut "Who Killed Amanda Palmer" (where she was murdered but in live performances of that Tour she was resurrected through a "pre-concert" séance) and the other subsequent projects, it was difficult to imagine what the New York singer-songwriter would delight us with considering the complexity and stylistic diversification (often decidedly "freak" like in the "Evelyn Evelyn" project) she undertook over the years and, to tell the truth, even after several listens, it's not that easy to have a clear idea if not a persistent euphoric perplexity (or perplexed euphoria as it would be more ontologically correct). Let's be clear: it is not an avant-garde album nor, of course, particularly innovative, it doesn't present particular difficulties in listening since the imagery (and imagined) to which she draws from is always that of branded Pop Culture (even if it seems a contradiction) "dark and anarchic" (after all, she wouldn’t have coined and self-imposed the label “Brechtian Punk Cabaret”) while musically the references that can be picked up in the various tracks are so broad (from the piano solipsism of Amos in "The Bed Song" to the "mannerist" one, how not to mention Carole King, of "Trout Heart Replica", don't be misled by the title, passing through the "New Wave" winks of "Want it Back" or "Massachusetts Avenue", not neglecting the "Electric Blues" of "Bottomfeeder" or the "brass delirium" in "A Grand Theft Intermission") that the list would be too long to draw up. Saying that the whole thing shines for homogeneity would therefore be a lie, but admitting that in the end the sensation that remains is that of having witnessed some kind of strange wonderful ritual ("It felt like listening to the soundtrack from some wonderfully anarchic musical" Richard Marcus, Music Review) is certainly not a sin.
An album that grows listen after listen but that presents some very interesting potential singles (excluding the mentioned tracks): "The Killing Type" (with those suites so "fm friendly" but also some valuable almost "micromusic" pastiche) and that mockery of "MtvPunk" that is "Melody Dean".
Everything should be evaluated according to the period in which it is born and prospers: I don't know if in eons it will be said that "Theatre is Evil" was a worthy child of its times (then it also depends on how they will go down in History: we are not reliable living in it) I know that my feeling is that, beyond the inevitable quotes (in another field even Newton admitted that if he saw so far it was because he stood on the shoulders of giants) this is an aggressively contemporary album (obviously many may see this as a flaw) "birthed" by one of the best artists of this era.
An artist, Mrs. Gaiman, who does not seem afraid of "making music" (fear that along with unresolved payments is the real evil of the century: in the face of "Ratzingerian" brand relativism) and this, from my point of view, is "a good and right thing".
Mo.
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