Lisa Germano
Happiness

THE REVIEW

There could not have been a more eloquent mockery than the title of this album. Yes, because its protagonist cannot really be said to be a happy girl. Perhaps the opposite cannot be said either. I will attempt to explain myself better.

Lisa is an artist capable of giving ever new meanings to the word pain: her attitude in facing the ugliness life proposes seems to be that of someone who, instead of wallowing in her own melancholy, thus ending up feeling sorry for herself, observes herself from the outside, almost with detachment, with a mix of resignation and self-derision. She is not exactly, or perhaps not “simply,” unhappy: rather, she is a commentator, sometimes cynical, sometimes self-ironic, of her own unhappiness. This is immediately clear when listening to the beginning of “Bad Attitude”, where each verse is at once a resigned acknowledgment and the derision of those who agonize over finding meaning in suffering (“You wish it was sunny but it’s not…ah ah ah”). When the din of violins and guitars dies away after the last chorus (“You could start over, it’s never too late”), a moving melody weaves through the guitar arpeggios as Lisa seems to find the only possible way out in the memory of childhood (“You would give anything to change back to when you laughed easy and all your moves were childlike”). Similar in mood is the next song, “Destroy The Flower”, an even more eloquent snapshot of her fragility (“it’ll never come out now, and that’s all your fault”).

These spine-chilling confessions, unlike what happens in her subsequent albums, are immersed in a jumble of distorted sounds resulting from an evidently more elaborate production and a more rock attitude. The mocking and very simple chorus of “Puppet” is immersed in a jubilation of guitars and studio effects of all kinds, “Everyone’s Victim” (“I am everyone’s victim”), a sort of female version of Beck's “Loser”, is dazed by the continuous dissonances of string instruments. “Cowboy”, a solemn and loving country ballad entrusted solely to her whisper and the acoustic guitar, seems almost like a sudden moment of silence, of truce, before the album's trilogy of masterpieces begins, “Happiness”, “The Earth”, and “Around the World”, which fade into each other like a single stream of consciousness. The first is a pungent reflection on life (“Give it up, try again, ain’t life fun…happiness”); the second a slow serenade that grips the heart when a celestial intertwining of mandolin and violin is added to the guitar; the last a nursery rhyme of hers, no less desolate (“what a waste to feel the way I feel”), yet with a chorus that seems like a jovial round dance.

The irresistible cadence of “Sychophant” does not prevent the song from being disturbed by continuous dissonant intrusions of the violin and keyboards with spectral sounds. Another calmer moment is the innocent melody of “The Dresses Song”: Lisa seems to have almost forgotten the pain that keeps her alive, yet even here a slight unease is visible, a painful realization of her own fragility, and consequently, the need for an “other” to hold onto (“Take me to your castle, it feels so good in there, I’m much safer in your castle, mine got lost somewhere”).

The ending of “The Darkest Night Of All” has the sweetness of the lullabies children sing to themselves when they are afraid of the dark, because the darkness of the mind is truly the darkest night of all. From the implacable mockeries I imagined they were, these songs end up being simply heartrending. Ain’t life fun?