Fasten Seatbelts for Amanda Palmer’s ‘There Will Be No Intermission’

The first proper song on Amanda Palmer’s There Will Be No Intermission opens with the maniacal tinkle of circus piano and then a gently tragic waltz, as Palmer sings “everyone’s reaching to put on a seatbelt / but this kind of ride comes without them.” Indeed, the 10-minute “The Ride” could be a proxy for the entire album. It’s morose, it’s longer than it needs to be, and, more often than not, Palmer sabotages her best concepts by extending them well beyond the breaking point.

“Some are too scared to let go of their children / and some are too scared now to have them,” she sings, painting a familiar picture in these dark days. And then, right on top of the welcome weight of that thought, Palmer overexplains the next one, driving all subtlety from the verse. “Suicide, homicide, genocide / Man, that’s a fuck-ton of sides you can choose from.”

Clocking in at a healthy 78 minutes (and accompanied by a dang book), There Will Be No Intermission is either an ambitious or under-edited work. There Will Be No Intermission wants very badly to be fringe and daring and inaccessible and weird — and truly believes it is fringe and inaccessible — but is simply too obvious overall to hit that mark.

“Your body is a temple / and the temple is a prison / and the prison’s overcrowded / and the inmates know it’s flooding,” Palmer sings, unleashing her lyrics in a tumult on “Drowning in the Sound.” “And the body politic is getting sicker by the minute / and the media’s not fake / it’s just very” — and here there is a long, dramatic pause, before she exhales “inconvenient.” The issue isn’t with the subject matter or the musicianship, but the editing. Especially if you consider the many essays in the accompanying book, what you have is a collection of songs extended well past the breaking point and explained into the ground.

Palmer trades in fear, anxiety, and self-doubt. Appropriately, There Will Be No Intermission is a collection of grand weepers sans grim reapers. Many cuts are ukulele driven, with sweeping, massive orchestration adding punctuation and depth throughout. Like a film score, Palmer establishes continuity by revisiting melodic themes. She wields an emotional sledgehammer, sobbing and whispering theatrically. It’s overwrought, yes, and by miles, but there are also golden moments during which she gets out of her own way and tells universal human tales.

“Bigger on the Inside,” for instance, begins rambling and unfocused before zeroing in on a stark tale of Palmer answering an email from a French fan who was sexually abused by his father. “He asked me, ‘How do you keep fighting?’ / and the truth is, I don’t know / I think it’s funny that he asked me / because I don’t feel like a fighter lately.” Somewhere, she tells the fan, “some dumb rock star truly loves you.”

While flawed, again, by its nearly 11-minute length and excess of extraneous detail, “A Mother’s Confession” is the strongest track, and perhaps the most universal. On There Will Be No Intermission, Palmer writes about abortion, about losing friends to cancer, and, in this case, about the side of motherhood that doesn’t show up in memes or come up in conversation. “A Mother’s Confession” is written episodically, with each verse chronicling a different event. Palmer’s infant son falls from a shelf; she leaves him in the car accidentally (not for long, thankfully); she gets pulled over for speeding, but can’t hear the cop for her crying child. “I figure everything is technically all right / if at least this baby doesn’t die,” she sings, putting the terrifying side of motherhood in concise, universal terms.

While there are occasional flashes of the album this could be (at about a third the length and 10 times the subtlety), There Will Be No Intermission is a crowded, under-edited document. In all honesty, there is a lot of humanity on this record, in that we’re messy, mistake-riddled vats of self-contradiction. It just feels like a first draft.