Okay, sometimes it takes me a while to catch onto stuff. The Dresden Dolls have been around for a couple years already, but I’m only recently discovering them. At least I’m falling in love with them! I want to describe the images that their music creates in my head.
Imagine, if you will, a girl singer who is institutionalized in an old-fashioned asylum, where she thinks she’s a 1920s cabaret performer. She has powdered her face bone-white and wears a corset and a garter belt and ripped stockings with seams down the back. She plays a piano, which the doctors kindly allow her to have in her small room, for therapy. She imagines her room to be a smoky and raucous dancehall in Weimar Republic-era Germany, where she is the headlining entertainer, sort of like an oversexed Tori Amos by way of a Gothed-out Sally Bowles, performing for a packed house of horny, disturbed madmen in some sweaty, seamy hell-cabaret. She also has a VERY good drummer backing her up.
Like I said, this is just what the music from their self-titled first album makes me think of. Luckily, singer/pianist Amanda Palmer is perfectly sane. She and drummer Brian Viglione, the two members of the Dresden Dolls, are from Boston. They have a new album, Yes, Virginia…, that I haven’t heard yet but intend to buy very shortly. They also have a live DVD that is available on Amazon.com for $6.99, which I also need to pick up sooner rather than later. I’d have to recommend them to fans of Tom Waits and Nick Cave (two of my favorite artists), as well as open-minded Tori Amos fans and anyone else who likes DARK music, but not metal and not consciously “Goth”-type stuff. They have a website with pictures, bios, lyrics, and even some downloads: http://www.dresdendolls.com/