Marianne Nowottny's Manmade Girl Is the Most Important Album of the New Millennium

Marianne Nowottny's Manmade Girl is probably the most important album of the new millennium. It's something that's totally unprecedented in this ultra-regurgitive day and age, something that comes from a space that's never been occupied by anyone else. Nowottny is a member of the generation to whom the Monica scandal was their Vietnam, with Columbine their Altamont. But amongst this malaise, she's achieved a stately, wise-beyond-her-years grace and omniscience. She's a shining light within an otherwise dull landscape.

This two-disc solo affair proves Nowottny is indisputably one of the major musical figures of her generation. It takes a lot of moxie to release a double-album when you're only 18. Most of this is just Nowottny and her piano as well as a few other keyboard effects, and it's a stark and brain-pounding exposé of psychodramatic proportions. The first disc consists of 13 almost cabaret-type outings. In its flickering weirdness it's vaguely reminiscent of Nico's lone-girl-and-her-harmonium phase, circa The Marble Index. It has that same kind of slightly macabre quality and Gothic subtext. But whereas Nico was primarily a one-note vocalist, Nowottny's range is more varied: the amazing "1000 Layer Pancake" is a mellifluous exercise in octave-jumping exposition on an almost Yma Sumac level.

Nowottny's a torch singer first and foremost?"Barely Nearly" is a sultry-as-Dietrich opus that sounds as otherworldly as the similarly skewered musings of another post-everything chanteuse, Azalia Snail. In "Rainy Days and Vinyl (Piano Version)" Nowottny intermixes a Sun Ra-style piano riff with Patti Smith-type poetic free flights to ask the question: "Do you still levitate when you sleep?" In "Mustard Seed" she plays with the word "has" over and over again like a modern-day Patty Waters. And in "Andre the Giant" she emits torchy fervor in honor of the hulking wrestler, whom she proclaims "the world's last true strongman."

All this is on the first disc. The second is in many ways even more amazing, less of a vocal excursion and more of a solo piano affair, although there are vocal spurts. This is where the young miss known as Nowottny proves her instrumental mettle. It's considerable on tracks like the semi-classical "Divinity," which contains a phone ringing somewhere in its midst for that "avant garde" effect. "Walk in the Woods" evokes goth/baroque weirdness. In "Dog of Ivory," warps of weird synth-burble mix with tinkling Richard Clayderman-like effects, but that's about as close to "new age" as this record gets. "Skeletons and Cherries" is almost Gong-ish prog-psych while "Dire" is nearly as atonal as Alan Licht. And all I can say about the title cut, "Manmade Girl," is wow and double wow: this track is like a Diamanda Galas Gothic flight through a barren glacial wasteland. Grab a scoop and get frosty.