Dresden Dolls “Backstabber”

Dresden Dolls‘ music is often characterized by its theatricality and highly charged emotion, which, along with their unique style of dress and performance, earned them the descriptive, yet limiting (and, it should be noted, self-applied) moniker of Cabaret-Punk. But don’t expect Toulouse-Lautrec to create the album cover for their forthcoming Yes, Virginia. First, because he’s been dead for a long, long time. Second, because while they obviously have roots in the highly stagy musical form, they’ve clearly taken strides to create their own identity within it. LIke the Fiery Furnaces’ Eleanor Friedberger (and to a lesser extent, Nellie McKay), singer/pianist Amanda Palmer’s intelligent, forcefully delivered lyrics frequently incorporate modern and often quotidian elements that elevate the music toward the level of the surreal.

“Backstabber” (mp3) is a salacious Jackie Collins novel of a song, the length and breadth of which Palmer employs to claw at the eyes of a person who’s done quite a bit wrong–someone “rotten like a crack whore” who’s now going to have to “come and join the bloodsport.” When the title phrase is repeated during the chorus, we get a fun cyclical word switch, and it becomes “stab her back”—a fun bit of tongue-in-cheek wordplay that finds a cousin later in the song when a Brechtian transgression is revealed–Palmer sings “and don’t tell me/not to reference/my songs within/my songs.” So maybe life is a cabaret after all.

Yes, Virginia will be released on Roadrunner Records April 13.