To her immense credit, there hasn't been much "same as it ever was" sentiment surrounding Amanda Palmer's new album Theatre Is Evil (out September 11). Her first full-length album with new backing band The Grand Theft Orchestra and first with producer John Congleton, the album has also been a pioneering success story for its immense turnout on Kickstarter, where fans and curious onlookers alike turned out in droves to help support the album's mastering, mixing, packaging and promotion, bypassing the influence and interference of a major label system. It's also, ultimately, perhaps her first solo endeavor to make a clean aesthetic break from the theatrical, piano-based "punk cabaret" sound she helped cultivate.
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We've gotten a good listen to Theatre Is Evil cuts "Want It Back" and "Do It With A Rockstar" already and now, as of this afternoon, there's another new Amanda Palmer tune for your manic obsessive pleasures. It's called "The Killing Type" and you can listen or download it right here.
"I wouldn't kill to win a war / I don't get what they do it for…"
Like Who Killed Amanda Palmer producer Ben Folds before her, Amanda has always had a funny little relationship with the guitar. It's cropped up from time to time… a little "Good Day" here, a little "Guitar Hero" there… but with the Grand Theft Orchestra behind her and visions of sugarplums and Joe Strummer swirling around her beautiful brain, her songwriting has settled into a more muscular sonic backdrop like Billy Idol's hand into fingerless leather glove. The opening of "The Killing Type" rolls and tumbles like an armful of Buzzcocks cassette tapes falling out of a backpack. "I think it's such a bore," she bemoans over a guitar sound befitting some sort of "biting" metaphor, "I'm really not the killing type."
"I've got a picture of your mom / Before the war, when she was young…"
And then comes the keyboards… that warm blanket feeling we so used to curling comfortably beneath, the one that says, "It's okay to like this—it sounds '80s-ish." Equal parts "West End Girls" and "All Cats Are Grey," it hums like a disinterested phantom, chilling out in the corner of the room while Amanda ponders the violence of the world versus the violence in her heart… and whether there's really any difference at the end of the day. "I would kill to make you feel!" she pleads, conducting (one imagines) the "whoa-oh-oh" chorale with arms raised high, sweat and existential restlessness migrating through each glitter-coated pore.
"Even if you never hear this song, somebody else will know…"
I just can't explain how good it feels to hear new Amanda Palmer music. Few artists out there can (or are willing to) toss as much of their internal organs into the blender of their songs the way she does. It makes me do this face… ^_^ …to hear her experimenting and digging into new sounds and styles with the same creative ferocity that built emotional symphonies out of a few piano chords and a couple cymbal crashes. "The Killing Type," like the rest of Theatre Is Evil we've heard thus far, does a bit of pop scrap-booking through the sounds and modes of Amanda's record collection, sure, but we can pinpoint and nitpick about it or we can just shrug our shoulders and say, "I like Joy Division too. So what?"
Verdict:
With "The Killing Type," Amanda Palmer continues to expand and revamp her well-trademarked sound without pissing at the doorstep of her idols… awesome mental image as that might be. This latest taste of Theatre Is Evil has more musical bite than your average bear "Ukulele Anthem," and she more than holds her own amidst The Grand Theft Orchestra's fuller, richer sonic territory.
…But what do you guys think of Amanda Palmer's "The Killing Type"? Get your own conversation started in our comments section below.
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