Carol Lipnik (is she or isn't she a living mermaid?) channels her Coney Island roots to create a unique clattering, clanging, weezing musical carnival confection complete with home made instruments, accordians, harp and horns.

12 MP3 Songs
FOLK: Modern Folk, ROCK: Folk Rock



Details:
Carol Lipnik and Spookarama's classic My Life As A Singing Mermaid produced by Bradford Reed (inventor of the Amazing Pencilina which is prominently featured) is now available here in a beautiful handmade edition.

CAROL LIPNIK chronicles a life spent in the decaying panorama that is/was Coney Island. Anyone who has ever seen the movie Angel Heart on the big screen knows that austere vision of that widescreen shot of Mickey Roarke walking across the beach to see the man from the carny. When the life leaves the circus, when the carnival has become carnivorous and the summer makes way for those gloomy Northeastern winters, it's sad and stark and haunting, like a cute toy left out in the rain. MY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID is one of those quintessentially American experiences, like watching Bugs Bunny or an episode of The Twighlight Zone on a Saturday afternoon. Your Dodge Dart won't start, you got laid off from your job (I think they call it âdownsizingâ these days), you took some records out of the library to explore some new sounds (The Three Penny Opera, Harry Partch, G. Gershwin) as you've worn the grooves off The Ramones' âLeave Homeâ- nothing seems to help shake off the shade. But Carol Lipnik understands. If Laura Nyro or Diamanda Galas grew up in Brooklyn with Syd Barrett and Randy Newman as her godfathers, the result could be The Devine Ms. L.
If DJ Spooky mix-melded Laura Nyro's âNew York Tendaberryâ with Tom Waits' âMule Variationsâ it might sound something like âMY LIFE AS A SINGING MERMAID.â
CL transmogrifies and distills that eerie pre-Prozac ambiance that only comes from being an American-where the clown that comes to your 6th birthday party later turns out to be John Wayne Gacy or Bobcat Golthwait, and nobody in the neighborhood is that surprised when a body is found down by the factory and you're looked upon as a âweirdoâ if you read anything other than the sports page or Seventeen.
Ms. L has a genuinely affecting range, just âdramaticâ enough to make her point. But unlike some âtheatricalâ singers, she injects equal parts warmth, wonder, angst, piss and vinegar into her songs, each a gem of construction. (With her you never feel like you're listening to some Broadway wannabe, or some primal-scream therapy dropout, nor a self-consciously avant-gardener.) Most unsettling is CL's cover of the Ramones' âI wanna Be Sedated,â which is given a deliriously languid reading, as if Lotte Lenya thought it was a variation on âGloomy Sunday.â Her band completes Lipnik's fractured sonatas, deriving from the zigzag amalgam(s) of Captain Beefheart, Tom Waits, circus music, pre-1962 cartoon music, Raymond Scott and Charles Ives. Call it Great Suburban Music, Ancient To The Future.
-Mark Keresman