This isn't a review.
I picked up the new CD (Who Killed Amanda Palmer?) by Amanda Palmer, the singer and primary songwriter for the band The Dresden Dolls. This was a great CD, musically very tight, and a pleasure to hear after the disappointment of the Dresden Dolls' last release Yes Virginia, which was to me a bit of a quality slip from their first release.
The Dresden Dolls are a great band, full of wild and creative energy, and this new release from Palmer shows how that energy and creativity thrives when brought under the focus of a really good producer. Who Killed Amanda Palmer? was produced by Ben Folds (of Ben Folds and the great 90s group The Ben Folds 5). I think that the best producers are those people who are themselves musicians because the understand how the process of being a musician and creating an album works, and in this case I think that Folds' contribution was to bring this wild creativity into a focus where it could really thrive and Palmer could create some of the best music of her career to date.
Frankly, this isn't a departure from the music of the Dresden Dolls. Which, for me, was a good thing because I like their music. If you don't like Palmer's work with them, you probably won't like this new CD either. No amount of producer's polish is going to change things that dramatically. But if you like good, strong, quirky songwriting with instrumentation of pianos, cellos, and a more cabaret sort of feel then I would suggest checking the CD (and the others by the Dresden Dolls) out.
This new CD does, however, raise the bar more than a bit for both Palmer and the Dresden Dolls now. I think that expectations for future music should be raised up as well. This is a good, solid CD and shows what she is capable of doing with a good set of musical tools.
