AEM060 Ivana XL

Ivana XL is the lat­est sub­ver­sion of one of the more famil­iar rock ‘n roll per­sonas: That Weird Girl. Look at her press photo: What crazy hair! Why is she dressed like a Google employee? Is that shit under her eye? That Weird Girl isn’t the girl who stuffed rolls into her sweat­pants at lunch in mid­dle school. That Weird Girl isn’t the lady who walks around your neigh­bor­hood with a block of wood tied to her arm that she checks peri­od­i­cally like a watch. Those are just weird girls.

That Weird Girl, on the other hand, is beau­ti­ful but dam­aged (but not in any way that would leave her dys­func­tion­ally insane), neu­rotic but relat­able (just like you!), a hard drinker (no pussy drinks), plays the gui­tar (or OK, the piano). Of course, the fact that That Weird Girl scans like a gro­cery list of every rock nerd’s mas­tur­ba­tion sce­nar­ios is def­i­nitely some kind of dead giveaway.

Still, the ques­tion is less one of authen­tic­ity than it is one of attach­ment. Why do we always, for lack of a bet­ter word, believe, in That Weird Girl? No one ques­tions if the guys in Bon Jovi walk around Wal­greens in leather pants and cow­boy shirts (I mean, they prob­a­bly do). But embed­ded within the iconog­ra­phy of That Weird Girl is a pre­sup­po­si­tion of truth­ful­ness, a pact between lis­tener and artist that says “Don’t lie to me.” From then on out, every affectation—from smok­ing in bed to rolling your r’s to dress­ing like an lumberjack—becomes an exam­ple of indi­vid­ual quirk­i­ness. From Grace Slick to Betty Davis to Bikini Kill to Court­ney Love to Missy Elliot to Regina Spec­tor to Amy Wine­house to Lady Gaga…these weird girls bank their careers not just on their music, but on a care­fully crafted larger-than-true-to-life-ness that both exceeds our expec­ta­tions and matches them perfectly.

I know I haven’t talked much about music yet, but that’s about to change. I men­tioned at the begin­ning of this review that Ivana XL is a sub­ver­sion of the That Weird Girl, some­thing she accom­plishes both on the level of pose and prod­uct. Take the name, the Don­ald Trump-ian oppo­site of slacker wet-dreaminess, to account for the lat­ter. Sound­ing like a cross between some kind of Soviet super-secret agent and a Pow­er­point pre­sen­ta­tion, Ivana XL rec­og­nizes the simul­ta­ne­ous irony and sex­i­ness in what amounts to over­selling oneself.

On the other hand, con­sider the record: These arrange­ments, con­sist­ing mostly of piano, acoustic gui­tars, Ivana’s voice and a fuck-ton of reverb, sound like they were laid down in a zero-gravity cham­ber with all the instru­ments float­ing around, bang­ing into one another, bunch­ing up in the cor­ners. The effect strikes an odd bal­ance between inti­macy and cold­ness, like some­one telling you about her child­hood over hot cocoa spiked with poi­son. If That Weird Girls are all about trust, then Ivana XL is about only let­ting you get so close before step­ping back into the infi­nite spa­cious­ness of her music, sub­sti­tut­ing one of her over­dubbed voices for another, coolly mul­ti­ply­ing per­son­al­i­ties behind a beat-up saloon-style keyboard.

The first track “Happy Birth­day” might be a human tran­scrip­tion of a music box melody, stop-starting sweet verses in order to let some ter­ri­fy­ing over­tones carry over the bar-line. It’s like the hal­lu­ci­nated sound­track to a film ver­sion of Alice in Won­der­land ani­mated entirely in crayon and cutouts from strangers wed­ding pho­tographs. I can’t get a han­dle on the creepi­ness here, but it’s def­i­nitely there, lurk­ing inside the arpeg­gios like the older-gentleman next-door-neighbor who’s always invit­ing kids over to earn a cou­ple extra bucks doing yard work or pol­ish­ing his car or what­ever. Sub­ur­ban mythol­ogy, dan­ger in the land of cir­cle dri­ve­ways and gaze­bos: this is the toxic sub­text of the tune, a birth­day salu­ta­tion hissed by a bag lady through the tra­cheotomy hole in her throat.

“Ex Oh,” has a sim­i­larly shaky rela­tion­ship to fact, fic­tion and night­mare, fit­ting chamber-pop hook­i­ness, folksy gui­tar pulls and a big drumkit crescendo into a three-minute super-8 home movie, the film crack­ling, the lens flare obscur­ing your own face in all the fam­ily shots. The sound is intensely per­sonal in the vaguest way pos­si­ble, some­how culling up every­one and no one’s half-remembered child­hood sum­mers, kids you kind of knew drown­ing in creeks, years and years of life con­densed into a drunken bath­room stall remem­brance some twenty years down the line. How these songs were writ­ten I don’t know, but these are some of the chanci­est, scari­est slow jams I know.

Ivana XL, like a scholar of weird girls every­where, has pulled the cam­era back on the singer-songwriter fake­book, the real that is some­how less real than the fakes it helped produce.

Ben Las­man

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