Here’s the scariest and most beautiful collection of piano ballads since Perfume Genius’ Put Your Back N 2 It, a year ago. But the mode of the songs on that album could have been called the advent of a new form, I noted at the time, and “ballad” seems even feebler a term to describe what Lisa Germano is up to on her ninth album. Even in 1993, when she was on a major label (very briefly) and playing a weird, digressive style of country and pop music, her songs were like teasing, magical coalescences and orchestrations of sounds pulled from her native environment. That’s so true here, on one of her most intimate and personal albums (read: indifferent to how it might fit in the context of modern music), that it seems necessary to dispense with a description of how these songs’ sounds were made, who made them, familiar nouns altogether, and just try to state exactly what the songs sound like, no context, pre-language, and then work backward through the rest. There’s one recurring sound, just a few synthesizer notes, cheap and haunting, that gains its melody and its ghost in the machine quality from an echo effect. It’s the bird leitmotif, first heard underneath idle chatter, then disembodied and unearthly on its own instrumental track, until it’s embedded in the ringing guitar and breathy vocals of the last song, “Strange Bird,” where it finally becomes the sound of a crushed soul’s ascension, perhaps.
The album’s larger patterns have that kind of nameless logic, the transition from the first to the second song in particular containing one of the most fascinating ideas about how to structure an album that I’ve encountered in a long time. The short, breathless meter and numb, elegant piano of “Ruminants” could be overture to just about anything, but what comes next, on the title track, is softer still, with only a second of atmospheric noise to serve as exposition before we’re pulled into some story of a queen, in medias res. Rather than the usual rise and rise and fall that most albums use to try to transmit an ongoing drama, the movement of No Elephants is more of a subtly shifting vantage point, our own, as we watch and listen to Germano in a single room, first up close and slightly from above, then from farther away, maybe behind a thin curtain. And so on.
That’s the name of one of the songs on No Elephants, and the phrase functions as her version of Vonnegut’s “and so it goes,” a little wearier in its acceptance. And there are apocalypses nearly as overwhelming as Dresden on Germano’s mind, and they need not acceptance but the kind of reckoning that never comes, except in the private space of albums like this one. Where the incomprehensible cruelty depicted in Perfume Genius’s songs is directed toward human innocents (see the “ripe, swollen shape” of the almost unbearable “17”), silenced, in part, for dramatic effect, Germano’s innocents are the animals, infinitely speechless and helpless (even the crows whose voices are the first things heard on the album), of a disordered world. “My communication with myself, the earth and its beings is getting weirder every day,” she says in some of the press that accompanies the album. That tendency is evident in her work, looking back to her last album, 2009’s no less quiet but more hopeful-sounding Magic Neighbor, which was overrun with a conscious effort to define the world in a positive way (“It’s a beautiful day,” Germano tells herself, and then, “If I ran away, and I never try, I might miss that the world could be so simple”), and found tension in the contrast. On No Elephants she nudges the time machine forward just a little farther and arrives to witness that final nameless creature writhing on the horizon, and she’s no longer able to deny what she’s always known. The day is fast approaching when we’ll be able to foresee what the last animals on Earth will be.
But I have to stop short here, before I overstate this album’s difficulty. Like all unpretty pictures, it’s never not beautiful and always a little bit ugly. And with a little mental work, it can be pushed into the company of albums of slightly easier means. On the one hand (the insistence of the piano lines) it recalls Emily Haines’ Knives Don’t Have Your Back, and on the other (the floating intuition of the vocal melody), Tori Amos’ Boys for Pele. And on every hand, Kristin Hersh’s endless, silver Hips and Makers. And while certain heavy themes dominate, so does a kind of light, fractured articulation. Germano has always maintained the perfect level of control over her material and its possible meanings, and on No Elephants her grip is never so tight that only a fleeting and superficial response to the music is possible, never so relaxed that the ideas can’t come through. She sets up the album’s central crisis with just a few words, none uncertain: “Hogwash / bulldozer / way out / of order.”
She’s the faultless artist she always was, but it’s weird to think back to her early work and try to comprehend (impossible, always) the impossible length of lives, careers. Right now she’s making her most timeless music, or at least the music that’s most immune to typecasting. I can’t imagine anyone today even trying to circumscribe her work or describe her in relation to someone else, the way that Geek the Girl was sold as the more honest whisper to contemporary screams. They defined her then as impervious to trends, and now, decades later, it’s easy to see that not as its own trend but as a state of being. And, impossibly, after all of this, she’s still young, and blessed, I hope, with ages to make exactly the kind of music she wants to make. On No Elephants, she knows that time’s running out for the world much faster than it is for her.
