Amanda Palmer There Will Be No Intermission 2LP (Pink Vinyl)

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Ten Bands re-issue their albums on limited edition pink vinyl, all for one cause. This is the 6th year for the initiative that has raised over $200,000 for Gilda's Club NYC, an organization that provides community support for both those diagnosed with cancer and their caretakers. It is named after comedian Gilda Radner, who passed away from cancer at the age of 43 in 1989.

Dresden Dolls co-founder and lead vocalist Amanda Palmer's third solo LP, There Will Be No Intermission, is the multi-faceted artist's most powerful and personal collection to date, with songs that tackle the big questions: life, death, grief and how we make sense with it all. While the themes may be dark, the album's overall sonic and lyrical mood is one of triumph in the face of life's most ineffably shitty circumstances. "Most of these songs were exercises in survival," says Palmer. "This isn't really the record that I was planning to make. But loss and death kept happening in real-time, and these songs became my therapeutic arsenal of tools for making sense of it all."

Recorded over a single month in Los Angeles by GRAMMY® Award-winner John Congleton (who previously engineered and produced 2012's acclaimed Theatre Is Evil), There Will Be No Intermission was entirely crowd-funded, this time by 12,000 patrons using Palmer's community hub at patreon. Palmer's often-overlooked skills as a pianist mark the LP with a stark but grand sonic approach utterly distinct from her two prior solo albums. Indeed, the album's 10 songs feature only a few extra overdubs provided by key associates, including Congleton, Palmer's friend and frequent collaborator Jason Webley, Montreal-based programmer/keyboardist Max Henry and veteran drummer Joey Waronker. Longtime collaborator Jherek Bischoff also added touches of prepared piano and upright bass; he also arranged 10 short orchestral instrumentals based on the motifs of the songs, creating an intermission of sorts between each track.

Somber yet exultant, There Will Be No Intermission presents still more dimensions to Amanda Palmer's already voluminous talent, once again confirming her as a master songwriter at the height of considerable power. This one-of-a-kind artist has miraculously molded humor, tears, confession, and naked personal pain into a matchless piece of work that could very well have been morose and gloomy but is, instead, deeply relatable, healing and inspiring.

Filled, appropriately enough, with intermissions -- arranged by longtime collaborator Jherek Bischoff -- There Will Be No Intermission reads at once like a diary, a manifesto, a chapter book and a letter to a friend. It's almost unfathomably ambitious, made by and for feelers of grand feelings, with minds too chaotic and overstuffed to contain all the big ideas that challenge and sustain them.

Cathartic in its honesty, There Will Be No Intermission is not dressed up in the same theatrics as her past work, but loaded with the drama of real life. Her fans have allowed us this record, and she's given the world all of herself in return.

There Will Be No Intermission is an album that needs to be taken in, in full. Just like the spaces. It's an exercise in survival and Amanda Palmer is an artist who is dedicated to doing what she's on this earth to do. There Will Be No Intermission is a work of art. It's as political a record as it is personal.