Lisa Germano

"You drag your living feelings/ where they don't belong," sings Lisa Germano on "Moon in Hell." Suddenly, plinking electric keys displace the song's previously lulling piano, and the listener is dragged into a child's claustrophobic music box. This new track is lovely and even wistfully tender on the surface, but its arc is rather discomposing, an effect Germano has spent 21 years and eight solo albums (nine, if you count the one with OP8) mastering. In the Maybe Worldis a CD about death, or rather a series of meditations evoking the specter of death, with songs about disappearance, alienation, and other forms of loss — though hope is to be found here as well: On the title track Germano wishes death upon a bird, figured as a kind of epistemic jailbreak: "let the bird fly/ let it out of here/ they just brought it/ as an offering/ it's the color of remembering/ and the weirdness of forgetting." This is the threshold of Germano's "maybe world," a pre-eschatological space of possibility, arranged through probing lyricism and dexterous instrumental craft. Almost no percussion marks time on this CD, seemingly because it is all about space. Germano's thoughts float on strange ether: Piano and guitar are soaked in delay, each note rippling outward, making room for her gauzy voice, which haunts and electrifies the surface. — Jeff DeRoche