Geneva Garvin moved from the San Diego area to Los Angeles in 2001, and quickly became a part of the city's art and music scenes. She fronted various bands that combined elements of no wave, minimal synth, and death disco, and particularly gained notoriety for her group Bubonic Plague, while also developing her solo persona,
Geneva Jacuzzi. She constantly recorded music and created art, and her videos and performances established an absurdist aesthetic that could just as easily recall situationism, classical Greek theater, and pantomime as well as
Nina Hagen and '80s aerobic videos. While some of her music saw release through the scene-making Human Ear Music, also home to early recordings by
Nite Jewel and
Julia Holter, the majority of
Jacuzzi's work only surfaced through limited, self-released CD-Rs, some of which were sold only on tour or directly through her Myspace page. Lamaze, her first official album, was released by Vinyl International in 2010, but it was basically a collection of highlights from her earlier Bubonic Plague and
Geneva Jacuzzi releases, all home-recorded on analog four-track and eight-track cassettes. Her songs are busy and playful, with pitch-warped vocals spilling over perky synth rhythms, creating a mood that's both spooky and joyful. Then-collaborator
Ariel Pink pops up on a few tracks, and while it's easy to draw parallels between both artists' approaches to homemade pop,
Jacuzzi's work is more theatrical and rooted in performance art rather than glam rock and AM pop, and frankly, hers is a lot more fun. "Love Caboose" has a funky rhythm recalling prime
Tom Tom Club, while altered voices seem to act out a sort of sinister inner dialogue. On "Do I Sad?," the track with the album's biggest, most memorable synth hook,
Jacuzzi passionately pleads for sadness, yet on "Bad Moods," she requests "no more sad stories" before playfully taunting "you put me in a bad mood!" in a vampiric tone. Other tracks such as "Gray Wave City" and "Zombie Shark" seem cute and silly on the surface, but carry a sinister undercurrent. Her way of playing with conflicting emotions contributes to the surreal nature of her work, and while it's fascinating to try and pick apart what these songs are supposed to mean, it's also easy to just appreciate the sheer strangeness and inventiveness of it all. When first released, Lamaze attracted a bit of a cult following, but
Jacuzzi never received the same amount of recognition as many of her scene-mates. Mexican Summer reissued the album in 2021, long after journalists had coined terms like hypnagogic pop and bedroom pop to describe aspects of what
Jacuzzi and her peers had been doing for decades, and in retrospect, her work stands apart in how it blends fantasy, comedy, drama, and dance into a distinct art form. ~ Paul Simpson