Lisa Germano
Excerpts From A Love Circus

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The stars-asterisks are a necessary addition to the evident 5 of which Lisa's work, following the masterpiece Geek the girl and a masterpiece itself, boasts: necessary because it would be like raising your head on the clearest night of our life and, attempting to count the stars, expecting to see only 5 and such things.

Excerpts From A Love Circus - 4AD - is a kind of stylistic exercise in the manner of Queneau, Germano embeds her personality into disparate musical forms and, in shaping herself, she discovers she's unique and polymorphic enough to create real masks behind which the radiant face of the composer is hidden.
If in the previous album one could sense a unique mood, a radical and maniacal mood that structured the sound, the new work presents itself more like a necklace of multicolored pearls threaded by a single string that links the episodes. It is an extremely varied album, from the initial "Baby On The Plane" with its vaguely South American air, where maracas and music box from a Mexican estate inject a sense of distance more than joy, to the pop song in which she drowns her desperate solitude "Small Heads". Germano, or her masks, reveals herself as sophisticated in "Forget It It’s A Mystery", where the mental convolution, which is always a self-analysis, a geometry of passions, is accompanied by a zigzagging clarinet, and extremely fragile in "Lovesick". As always, sobriety is the strong element of the author who holds back her feelings a moment before they overflow into melodrama and are tinged with pathos as in the splendid "We Suck" where the piano touches the depths of her personality with a chromatic digression while the violin intones a heartfelt song of light. The relationship with the opposite sex is explored in "Messages From Sophia", where the dizzying 'monadism', the impenetrable hermitage of the individual, reaffirms itself.

Each track, however, deserves the due attention, the moving panicked moments of "Singing To The Birds", the everyday nature of "Bruises", to fully appreciate its purgatorial nature, the elegiac pattern, the nostalgia of an unreachable happiness which is no longer [more] despair but an impulse, a longing to at least brush against it: "Big Big World"
Then there are her cats too, what more could you want?