There's undeniable power in a woman's scream. Whether in anger or frustration, in fear or in grief, in joy or in pain, the sound of a female voice rising up to the implacable heavens sends shivers straight down the spine of even the most jaded listener. Beyond the din of angrified women's voices joining the musical chorus -- a la Courtney Love and Polly Jean Harvey -- some of the quietest screams resonate the longest.

Lisa Germano has plenty to scream about, at least as evidenced to her deeply disturbing new album, "Excerpts from a Love Circus" (4AD). She's got a psyche riddled with gouges and scars, displayed with the utter politesse of a hostess at a tea party on the day before she commits suicide. Germano's screams are the sort that are swallowed whole, gulped down in fear of appearing rude, masked by a ghastly grimace that tries and fails to become a smile.

"Love Circus" is the follow-up to her relentlessly harrowing 1994 album, "Geek the Girl," which found Germano delving into her own personal slough of despond, a well that shows no signs of running dry anytime soon. "Geek the Girl"'s title track was a lovely little ode to insecurity built on an ever-wavering melody and the near-whispered chorus, "Uh oh, I'm not too cool, angry and dumb but not too cool."

It turns out that two years later Germano still isn't all that cool, but she's brave enough to use her sweetly tentative voice with a scalpel's precision, stripping back her skin until the tendons and viscera are laid bare, arranged like so many cookies on a tray. Her delivery tends to be more than a bit spooky, with the skreel of her violin providing a counterpoint that sounds like the mind itself struggling to balance on top of sanity's razor blade edge. Even when she slips and bleeds it's impossible not to watch, fascinated, if a little nauseated.

The hilariously named "I Love a Snot" finds Germano near-humming the words in a litany of matter-of-fact self-loathing: "tubby tubby butt, tubby tubby face, tubby tubby stomach when I am with you." There's an implausibly catchy melody behind this list of Wrong Things (every woman has one memorized), before she continues, "icky icky breath, each and every kiss ... you're a snot, and I adore you."

"Victoria's Secret," the sole track produced by Bill Bottrell (who implausibly is also behind Sheryl Crow's first and Linda Perry's latest), stands out in this three-ring circus of dysfunction. "What is Victoria's secret?" wonders Germano, before answering, "She says you are ugly ... your man wishes you looked like me." It's an all too familiar litany of female self-loathing, a plaintive rumination on having your morning ruined by picking up the mail and finding a glossy catalog. "Just what I need today shoved down my face," she sighs. "Pretty lonely ugly woman getting mail from you ... are you real or am I simply ugly?"

"Excerpts from a Love Circus" is like a muffled scream swallowed whole. Lisa Germano's murmurs may not be as raucous as some, but her anguish is more than loud enough to wake the dead.

The dark side of the Carpenters was always lurking beneath the surface of their perfectly arranged songs. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to peel back fluffy pop layers and discover the blackened anguish beneath Karen's delivery of lines like, "All I know of love is how to live without it/ I just can't live without it." And in fact, she didn't, starving herself to an early grave at the tender age of 32.

Sixteen years after its intended release date, A&M Records has just put out "Karen Carpenter: The Solo Album." Firmly rooted in the '70s, the disk finds Karen trying on a variety of personas for size, perhaps in an effort to rid herself of the wistful love songs that were the Carpenters' trademark. The result is a mixed bag, with much of it imminently disposable, being riddled with lush production and disco rhythms, but there is the occasional Moment. A pensive, almost cynical Karen covers "Still Crazy After All These Years" with such a sense of yearning that it's almost possible to ignore the intrusive over-instrumentation threatening to crush her with overkill.

Long ago, and not so far away, the duo from Downey had one of the best-selling albums of all time on the charts. And long after her death, Karen Carpenter's legacy isn't just the size of her smile or the perk of her voice. If you listen closely enough, the pain and darkness beneath sounds remarkably like a scream.

Her home on the World Wide Web is right here.