Excerpts from a Love Circus has a weird glamour to it - it's like some junkyard princess's imaginary diary, set to music and distorted by its passage through the looking glass...everything she touches is lightly dusted in a sort of fractured, broken-apart-and-put-back-together pop sensibility, at once knowing and somehow retaining an air of the naïf.
"Small Heads" is still perfect, delightfully off-balance and impossibly catchy, lyrics at once hinting at the profound and verging on nonsensical tossed off in Germano's husky drawl while all the little musical details accumulate underneath (plinking piano, recorder, unidentifiable percussive bits, a snatch of her too cool for words violin-playin', etc); the song's like a miniature Tom Waits pop ditty as done by a girl or something. It's been one of my favourite songs for years and is just as good in the setting of the album.
Others that are especially good: "Baby on the Plane", "Bruises", "I Love a Snot", "We Suck" (a ballad!).
