Lisa Germano
Slide

Slide is a record where suffering becomes singable, it clings to you, gets under your skin, becomes part of you, you can't do without it. It is one of those records that has the courage to probe the most hidden and concealed aspects of the human soul, fear and resignation, and to describe them with such tenderness and sincerity that borders on self-harm, with eyes full of tears.
Most of the melodies on the album are extraordinarily simple and catchy like children's nursery rhymes (If I Think of Love, Electrified), but eccentric arrangements at times disturbed by small noises and slight dissonances (Tchad Blake's great production) make them pure visions. Elsewhere, it's just the piano accompanying her troubled self-analyses (Wood Floors, Guillotine Love), and those are perhaps the most touching moments of the record. Her most surprising gift is perhaps her ability to transform initially very timid songs into poignant songs of pain that tug at the heart. Listen, to believe, to tracks like the opening Way Below the Radio, where a radiant chorus emerges from an ethereal and frayed verse, or the desolate No Colour Here, which begins as a regular Joni Mitchell-style folk ballad and gives way, just when the harmony seems to have gone silent, to a moving duet between accordion and violin.
The masterpiece within the masterpiece is the concluding Reptile, a whirl of sounds and timbres that exemplifies how Lisa manages to be both solemn, dramatic, and catchy (with that tiptoeing chorus, childish and sweet like a lullaby). In between, tracks like Tomorrowing and Crash confirm on one hand her inexhaustible compositional creativity, as well as the depth of her reflections and the emotional abyss she seems to have fallen into (“Feeling good to not feel bad is way too weird for me…” and again “I wonder why it’s so easy to be the way I hate, and so hard to turn around and say yeah” from Crash).

Her soft and ecstatic whisper may seem insignificant compared to other great rock voices, but it's really hard to imagine delicate and subtle melodies like Slide or Wood Floors sung in anything other than her neutral and angelic murmur. A sense of fragility and sweetness accompanies the listening experience of the album, and it's not hard to perceive Lisa as a friend confiding her pain to you. But it is something that goes far beyond mere confessional music because often the author's personal dramas are so transfigured that they take on universal meanings. And it's impossible to think of Lisa Germano as an artist simply tormented and locked in her pain, because in the end, her way of expressing herself is so simple and accessible that it fully engages and involves the listener, even if one doesn't know (or understand) the source of such suffering.