[music] THE DRESDEN DOLLS - Yes, Virginia (Roadrunner)

After playing this more or less non-stop for four days, my heart sank when I read some of the words online. I don't even know where to start.

Amanda Palmer puts together great lyrics, line by line; it's her larger ideas that get depressingly insipid. Girls want emotion and boys want sex, and that's just the way things have always been. You are being manipulated by corporations. Expressing yourself is good! People who stay in abusive relationships are stupid and crazy. People who criticize her music are just stupid. People who are too jaded about the music industry to think she'll be succesful-- shallow, vain, lazy, and probably stupid.

But that's not fair of me; the last bit is informed by an online interview in which Palmer reveals that "Backstabber", which already seemed self-absorbedly bilious and petty when all I had to go on was its own lyrics, is actually about someone who likes the band but displayed insufficient optimism about their major-label prospects. The punishment for neutrality: "You're a fucking backstabber / Hope-grabber / Greedy little fit-haver / God, I feel for you-- fool! / Shit-lover / Off-brusher..."

For that matter, maybe "Delilah" (the abusive-boyfriend song) doesn't mean to criticize everyone whose life matches the scenario, just one particular friend of Palmer's. Would that make it better? Easier for me to overlook, at least?

I would love some excuses for overlooking Yes, Virginia's flaws, since almost everything not awful helped impel my weekend-long spree. And this despite not liking the first album, if that helps you decide whether to care.

If this is Brecht, where's the distancing device? I only see one real candidate: the "missed" notes that punctuate Palmer's vocal gymnastics. It worked on me, anyway. At the same time, I have trouble hearing several of these songs as anything but unmediatedly maudlin; album closer "Sing", for example. Sing! Sing out! Don't let them tell you not to! Be yourself, man!

Good advice, sure. But badly put (in the song, not just my paraphrase), and if it's inside some Brechtian theatrical frame, I have no idea what the real intent is.

(Oh-- I can also see how Palmer's occasional self-referential lyrics serve to remind the listener that none of this is spontaneous or 'natural'. Writing songs addressed to real-world acquaintances kind of spikes that strategy, though.)

Okay... what else? "My Alcoholic Friends", very good. "Dirty Business", very good. "Shores Of California", fantastic except that the title is a cheat. "Sex Changes", great. Last year around this time, I complained that Bloc Party combined amazing music with penny-ante lyrics; in the end, the music won me over. If it doesn't happen again, my loss. [Out sometime in April.]