**1/2 Lisa Germano

SLIDE

(4AD)

With Happiness ('94) and Geek the Girl ('94), Lisa Germano put her stamp on the indie-femme development with an appealing brand of the genre's disaffected broodiness and the sort of cryptic/ethnic musical flourishes one might expect from a violinist/fiddler. But by now, with this fifth album of ambiguous sadness, one begins to wonder whether she plans to stroke the scars of a sensitive adolescence for a career's worth of unspecified gloom or whether perhaps it all just might be a matter of chemical imbalance. Actually, Germano is less gloomy than glum, less complaining than uncommunicative -- if you don't feel the way she does, she isn't going to talk you into it.

On Slide it's apparent that some smart effort has gone into devising accompaniments for her airy, monotonic voice. And on cuts like "Turning into Betty," with its creaking-door guitar and its tacky, spongy organ, and "Electrified," with its Carnival of Souls keyboard, there's a goofy sumptuousness that embellishes her sketchy lyrics. But the meaning of her essential wistfulness remains elusive, which may explain why the slow, dreamy cuts ("Wooden Floor," "Guillotine") evaporate on the spot.

-- Richard C. Walls