Dresden Dolls
No, Virginia…
(Roadrunner Records, 2008)

For a band with such an outrageous live show, an outlandish cabaret-style spectacle where stilt-walkers and strip shows are equally expected, the music of the Dresden Dolls is surprisingly intimate. If the Boston two-piece’s music were as zany as its onstage antics, it would be easy to dismiss as a novelty, as a precocious act with a shelf-life clearly labeled on the front of their kickdrum. In reality, this is not the case. While there is a bit of a Weimar-era German cabaret quality to their sound, the band’s music owes more to decades of radio-friendly American piano pop and, quite interestingly, punk rock.

If you were to switch out frontwoman Amanda Palmer’s piano and replace it with an electric guitar doing virtually the same thing, a lot of the songs on the Dresden Dolls’ new album, a collection of B-sides and a handful of tracks they recorded earlier this year, would sound like whip-smart slices of punk fun, because deep inside Palmer’s Kander and Ebb façade beats a heart that’s equal parts sneer and smirk—the hallmark of every great punk rocker. That said, if you took away the piano, you’d loose the very core of what makes No, Virginia… a really fun and engaging album. Palmer pounds the ivories with a fearless abandon that effortlessly fills the empty corners of a sound that, while often minimalist, is never sparse or sonically lacking. Three-quarters of the way though the album, on their cover of the Psychedelic Furs’ “Pretty in Pink”, they introduce an organ sound, and it’s a pleasant realization that up until then the sonic palette has remained remarkably constant (other than some subtle background guitar fuzz on a track or two) without getting dull or repetitive.

This doesn’t mean that every track is uniformly great. Some, like the album opener “Dear Jenny”, are. “Dear Jenny” seems like a song plucked directly from the collective unconsciousness of people whose love of ‘90s piano pop has largely gone unrequited since Ben Folds dropped the Five and started making albums with William Shatner. “Sad but true the truth can turn your smile to a frown / So what’s the use dear Jenny anyway / The world is pretty upside down,” sings Palmer with a breathy grin that recalls a Bachelor No. 2­-era Aimee Mann. The darkness of the lyrics is muted by the peppiness of the tune itself, a tactic that is also used to great effect on “Lonely Organist Rapes Page Turner”, which has Palmer telling a tale of a scared and innocent student being seduced by her much older, creepy piano teacher over an over-caffeinated punk riff that practically begs to be played in front of a sea of pogoing kids in an alternate-reality Warped Tour. Yet it’s on the mellower songs that the album starts to lag. The long album closer, “Boston”, is a bit of a snoozer, as is the slowly building “Mouse and the Model.” Not all the slower songs miss their mark though. The mournful “Gardner”, with its come-hither whispers, plaintive howls, and fake-out climaxes is a deft exercise in the build-up and release of tension and is one of the album’s best moments.

For a record that’s partially comprised of cast-offs from other records, there’s a surprising amount of cohesion and a uniform level of quality that stays constant throughout the duration of the album. In fact, it’s difficult to tell the difference between the old songs and the new songs. Whether this is indicative of a lack of significant artistic progression or the fact that the older songs were chosen and sequenced well is debatable. But what isn’t debatable is that, cabaret shenanigans aside, No, Virginia… shows the Dresden Dolls for what they really are—intelligent and compelling songwriters.

Listen: Various Tracks [at myspace.com]

More articles by Aaron Sankin:

Album review of Elf Power, In a Cave

Album review of Young Knives, Superabundance

Album review of British Sea Power, Do You Like Rock Music?