Issue 386

Peeping Tom



"I'll be honest with you: it sounds good in the press release to say 'six years in the making' but it wasn't quite like that," Mike Patton laughs about his long-awaited Peeping Tom record. "I think I first starting writing some tunes for this project about five years ago, but I had no idea where they were going to go. And I probably started talking about it three or four years ago and that was premature! So if you really add up the time that I spent working on the damn thing, it was probably six months as opposed to six years...but I'm glad it's out man, I'm very glad it's out."

The Dresden Dolls
Yes Virginia...
Roadrunner/UMA

Normally I accept that record label vagaries often make strange bedfellows, but The Dresden Dolls' presence on Roadrunner still baffles me. It leads me to speculate that such a label might allow Amanda Palmer (vocals, songs, piano) and Brian Viglione (drums) a level of creative control that their heavier, more chart-bothering labelmates lack simply because the company heads might not understand what's going on. Certainly 'Yes Virginia...' is pretty much exactly not what a label would be looking for in a second album: it's idiosyncratic, articulate, wide-ranging and, a healthy dose of self-reflection notwithstanding, not even a tiny bit emo. It's also probably the best record that'll be released this year.

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