Like the oft-mentioned Vegemite spread, you either like Amanda Palmer or you really, really don’t. Undeterred, the post-record industry songstress has returned with another collection of vibrantly fun, sometimes melancholy new tunes that will do little to sway haters’ taste buds yet accurately sums up her post-Dresden Dolls work ethic/aesthetic. Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under (available for download here) feels more like a charming travelogue than a proper album-- with most of its twelve tracks recorded live in Australia and New Zealand, her bittersweet piano playing and (still baffling) ukulele love affair paint vivid portraits of unhappy housewives, wonky menstrual cycles, and seaside existentialism with tongue planted firmly in cheek.
Opening with a wink-nudge take on “Makin’ Whoopee”, the record segues into a beautiful new song (naturally) called “Australia”, with its dish-washing, cake-baking heroine throwing care to the wind and heading down under to “carry a Bowie knife” and “wear [her] hair like Hepburn, parted on the side”. Like the best of Palmer’s songs, it is a bushy-tailed tale filled with humor and hope that thinly veils a hidden layer of desperate sadness. “Vegemite (The Black Death)” is less solemn and considerably funnier; over a playful show tune melody, Amanda gleefully shares the tale of a woman disgusted by her significant other’s love of that horrid black sandwich spread.
Never straying too far into camp (excluding the maddeningly catchy electro bounce of “Map Of Tasmania”), the AUS/NZ song cycle is alternately introspective (“In My Mind”, featuring a very welcome cameo by fellow Dresden Doll Brian Viglione on twelve-string guitar), brutally frank (“New Zealand”), and densely atmospheric (a beautiful cover of “On An Unknown Beach”, originally performed by the New Zealand post-punk group Nocturnal Projections). You’ll do well to look up The Jane Austen Argument and Mikelangelo, two local acts whose contributions make for some of the album’s most timidly enchanting and boisterously kitschy moments, respectively. Ending on a well-executed, early Billy Joel interpretation of Nick Cave’s “The Ship Song”, Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under is filled to the brim with modest revelations of charismatic humor and grace. Her detractors certainly won’t see what all the fuss is about, but AFP fans will greet these tunes with a very resounding “G’day!”
Sum-ology: A piano/ukulele tour through our favorite country-continent. Thoroughly funny, charming, and smile-inducing, Amanda Palmer Goes Down Under is sure to be the best sixty-nine cents you’ll spend this year.
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