Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Will inform your dreams and vice-versa., August 23, 1999
By A Customer
A jarring mixture of pathos-infected purging and swirling lo-fi keyboards, Nowottny's debut CD evokes a reaction. A reaction in the sence that everyone will be drawn differently, but no less powerfully. "Afraid of Me" is a nightmare, but an attractive one. The cover artwork is striking- a pasty princess set against an aqua wall. The music - a 16-year-old New Jersey high school student tripping on acid and mimicking Lou Reed's "Berlin" as best she can without waking the neighbors - will inform your dreams and vice-versa. Not unlike David Cronenberg's "eXistenZ", where life is a game within a game, Nowottny drags the listener way farther down than they deserve. If you remember hearing PJ Harvey for the first time and it still makes you feel, well, funny, than "Afraid of Me" is for you. Never has absolute schizophrenia and intense sexual tension been so un-ironically mastered by a goth kid dressed like Moroccan royalty. Buy at your own risk, whick I mean in a good way. (Brett Essler)
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4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Catchy melodies, unpredictable song-structures, great words., October 11, 1999
In an era when music (and musicians) are micro-managed into existence by corporate production teams, it's getting harder and harder to find anything that sounds the remotest bit "real." The songs, playing, and words on this CD, by one-woman-band Marianne Nowottny, come straight from the solar plexus, but this music is NOT alterna-rock balladeering. It's synth/art/poetry/classical/goth/pop, completely original and hook-y as hell. Some words are slurred together almost like scat-singing, but the lyric sheet reveals a complex, contradictory discourse, in which cliches ("see with new eyes") are followed with harsh twists ("speak with new lies"). Diverse musical influences--raga, baroque classical, Gary Numan, Jerry Lee Lewis--are effortlessly merged, not in the cut-and-paste manner of stadium prog-rock but with an intuitive inner logic. There are rough edges here that those corporate teams would snip out and smooth over, but I'll take the unpolished over the manufactured any day.
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