Maria McKee
Life Is Sweet

No, this time she's not on the cover. Instead, there's an old photo from the early 1900s, almost faded, gray-green like the color of memory, showing a group of people dressed elegantly (the photo not only covers the front but also the back of the CD booklet, with other more eccentric figures, perhaps for a carnival party or a circus show). Yet Maria is present (oh yes!), but on the back of the album. The photo of her seems to express that exhaustion and relief typical of the effort women exert when giving birth. Hair swept back, almost damp with sweat, very little makeup, an unbuttoned gray shirt, shadow covering half of her.

Yes, this time Maria has delivered her most tormented, difficult, shouted, screamed album. Raw rock, cried out by a powerful voice, overwhelmed and cradled by "crushing" guitars (the closest translation: "that crush, annihilate, flatten"), deliberately distorted. Joni Mitchell meets Kurt Cobain who walks hand in hand with Iggy Pop imitating David Bowie (or rather Ziggy). Grunge and songwriting. Dark, tense, (hyper)dramatic, tragic, masochistic, sadistic, desperate, and terrifying (this is no longer the pop of "Show Me Heaven" or the country/rock of the first two albums, beware, with this album people might even get scared!). It penetrates the subconscious, creeps into your limbs, flows relentlessly towards the brain, from which it spreads incessantly to every millimeter of your body.

1996: the turning point. "Life Is Sweet" is Maria's last album for Geffen (who lost patience after this and fired her), but the first that makes her truly emerge as an artist in her own right. Keyboards, guitars (played by Maria herself), drums, and bass: all intertwined with roaring string arrangements that highlight the grandeur of the album's drama. The country is gone, the soul has retreated into an intimate place and has emerged as pure rock, and the pop remains in Geffen's old archives.

One must not play with fire, because the blaze is always imminent, smoldering in the depths of the psyche; but when it explodes, there's no stopping it. That's what I thought when I first listened to the album; it wasn't her first CD I bought (I found it purely by chance, perhaps the only one available in all the stores in Rome, as it was out of print), it was like a punch to the stomach, but it marked the first step towards madness, obsession, and perversion toward this artist. I had never felt anything like it, not even towards those who are now my idols (Joni Mitchell, Tori Amos, Joan Baez, and others). I don't know, but when this album dragged me to the depths of all fragile, defenseless, and terrified humanity faced with the mysterious nature that reveals itself (a kind of "sublime" theory), I picked up the cover again and tried to find some connection with the album, Maria must be saying something! The first image that came to mind is that under the bench where those figures posed there's a bomb (the album), and that photo aimed to capture them just before their death, just before the end of their existence when they can finally say with certainty: "Yes, life was sweet." Maybe I'm rambling a bit, but I think I'm sick, and the sickness is called "Life Is Sweet," and the strain it comes from is called Maria McKee. This album is this album is this album is this album is this album is this album is this album... I’d better get a grip: I still need to talk about the song lyrics, the more you know, the better, maybe someone can find me an effective cure. I must remain lucid... Anger, resistance, challenge, condemnation, fragility, schizophrenia, rebellion, hypocrisy (and more) are the main themes present.

The album opens with 4 epic songs of pure art-rock: a love declaration for scars ("Scarlover" - "You fall beyond my body like a death shroud/ Your wounds were as visible as mine, no frayed edges well defined/.../ The repulsive inside of me taught me beauty"), the obsession of "This Perfect Skin" ("Lost as we spin around, I saw you in this perfect dress, skin of our skin/ our hands entwined, the silk is our breath/ I wear it for you this perfect dress/ This perfect room, this little death, a birth without a womb"), the theme of the double in "Absolutely Barking Stars", incomparably powerful ("I tried to trap her in my head but she knows where the light enters/ .../ I am her twin, I live on the other half/ I attempt to tear the seam but it won't rip"), the furious rebellion of "I'm Not Listening" ending with a distorted violin coda that supports heart-wrenching screams ("I'm not listening, I'm not listening, I'm not listening anymore/ you shut my mouth with a wire, now my head is full of lies/.../ If I'm a phoenix, if I'm a demon or a wise man or a fraud/ or if I'm cowardly, leave me alone/ Once you almost killed me").

Then the second part becomes more subdued (figuratively speaking) and confessional, but it's just the calm before the storm: there is self-destruction ("I hate who I am/ .../ Sometimes I wish I was never born/ it's really a terrible excuse to breathe" in "What Else You Wanna Know"), the morbid subservience to a semi-god lover ("I'm alone now with my restraints/ Desperate and drained of all that anger/ And I'm nothing without a heart filled completely to the brim to burst/ with death upon its wake" in "Human") and finally the realization and attempt at resistance of the last song that gives the album its title in a spine-tingling musical crescendo, voice and electric guitar at the beginning and cacophonous orchestra at the end ("This is for the girl who says these voices she hears in her head won't let her go/ Don't listen to your teacher, you're not crazy, just smarter than others/.../ Life is sweet, life is sweet, life is sweet, life is bittersweet" in "Life Is Sweet").

I feel like I can't go on, my physical and mental energies are abandoning me, and I leave the conclusion to a phrase by writer Thomas Pynchon dedicated to a novel he loved so much ("Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me" by Richard Farina), but it seems perfect to describe in a few words the scope of "Life Is Sweet": "This album arrives like a hallelujah chorus intoned by two hundred perfectly tuned kazoo players".

Maybe there is no cure, maybe I will be forced for eternity to inject myself daily with a dose of Maria McKee to survive.