There Will Be No Intermission [LP]

Amanda Palmer has announced the eagerly-awaited release of her first solo album in more than six years. THERE WILL BE NO INTERMISSION is the multi-faceted artist's most powerful and personal collection to date, with songs that tackle the big questions: life, death, grief and how we make sense with it all. While the themes may be dark, the album's overall sonic and lyrical mood is one of triumph in the face of life's most ineffably shitty circumstances."Most of these songs were exercises in survival," says Palmer. "This isn't really the record that I was planning to make. But loss and death kept happening in real-time, and these songs became my therapeutic arsenal of tools for making sense of it all."Recorded over a single month in Los Angeles by GRAMMYr Award-winner John Congleton (who previously engineered and produced 2012's acclaimed THEATRE IS EVIL), the album was entirely crowd-funded, this time by 12,000 patrons using Palmer's community hub at patreon.Palmer's often-overlooked skills as a pianist mark the LP with a stark but grand sonic approach. The album's 10 songs feature only a few extra overdubs provided by key associates, including Congleton, Palmer's friend and frequent collaborator Jason Webley, Montreal-based programmer/keyboardist Max Henry and veteran drummer Joey Waronker. Longtime collaborator Jherek Bischoff also added touches of prepared piano and upright bass; he also arranged 10 short orchestral instrumentals based on the motifs of the songs.Somber yet exultant, the album presents more dimensions to Palmer's already voluminous talent, once again confirming her as a master songwriter at the height of considerable power. This one-of-a-kind artist has miraculously molded humor, tears, confession, and naked personal pain into a matchless piece of work that could very well have been morose and gloomy but is, instead, deeply relatable, healing and inspiring.