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Pop, soul, alternative art pop, chamber pop.

The New York singer’s voice will make you shiver as it soars over simple guitar, bass and drums on her most approachable album since the mid-00s

You would be hard-pushed to call Anohni’s sixth studio album – her first since Hopelessness seven years ago – anything other than an unexpected departure. Whatever path you imagined her admirably peripatetic career might take next, it’s unlikely you pictured it involving a collaboration with Jimmy Hogarth, producer and songwriter for the likes of James Blunt. Anohni’s recent releases had shifted her ever further into the musical left field – or rather, back towards the left field from where she sprang, Anohni being, in the words of her friend Rufus Wainwright, “a real underground downtown institution” in New York clubland long before the Mercury-winning success of 2005’s I Am a Bird Now (recorded as Antony and the Johnsons) led another friend, Boy George, to suggest she could “outstrip Norah Jones and sell millions of records”. The feeling that the left field might have appealed more than the mainstream was hard to escape when listening to her 2020 cover of Bob Dylan’s It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, her voice deliberately distorted in a way that made you wince. Or indeed the same year’s RNC 2020, a melange of screams and feedback that even its creator described as “pretty rough”.

There’s still something deeply uncompromising about it: the lyrics are a potent stew of grief, environmental apocalypse and excoriations of transphobia; a brief track called Go Ahead features Anohni’s voice at its most stentorian over noisy freeform guitar and what sounds like feedback, but is apparently a recording of a lemur’s song. But its default setting involves simple electric guitar figures, bass and drums, occasionally shaded with sax or piano or delicate orchestrations, carrying the retro-soul flavour of Hogarth’s best-known songs. Anohni has mentioned Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On as an influence, and you can catch something of the atmosphere of that album’s looser tracks – Wholy Holy, Save the Children – on Why Am I Alive Now? and There Wasn’t Enough.

It Must Change, by Anohni and the Johnsons

For all its idiosyncratic intensity, Anohni’s voice is a remarkably portable instrument, as much at home performing over Hercules and Love Affair’s disco-infused house as it is essaying Nico’s Janitor of Lunacy accompanied by former members of Throbbing Gristle. But its setting on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels like a particularly good fit, underlining her links to old blues, jazz and R&B singers. It’s an album that offers one subtly striking song after another. You could read It Must Change as a desperate love song, or another in its author’s series of warnings about impending environmental collapse – the accompanying video, with its footage of California wildfires, suggests the latter – but it feels wrenching however you interpret it.

Can’t, meanwhile, starkly details the aftermath of a friend’s suicide – “You are dead, I am here stranded among the living” – to the accompaniment of surprisingly bouncy funk that builds to a crescendo while Anohni repeats the title over and over again: misery that becomes a type of catharsis. She perceives death through a more tender lens on Sliver of Ice, concerned with the last days of her friend and mentor Lou Reed, imminent death heightening his appreciation of life’s simplest pleasures, including the sensation of an ice cube melting on his tongue. Sweetly, the tremolo-heavy guitar evokes dreamy doo-wop and early rock’n’roll ballads, music beloved of its subject.

My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross feels like a particularly powerful entry in her discography: surrounded by music that’s beautiful but relatively straightforward, that voice seems more extraordinary

Tracks:
01. It Must Change
02. Go Ahead
03. Sliver of Ice
04. Can’t
05. Scapegoat
06. It’s My Fault
07. Rest
08. There Wasn’t Enough
09. Why Am I Alive Now
10. You Be Free

Staat er compleet op, 10% pars mee gepost. Met zeer veel dank aan de originele poster. Laat af en toe eens weten wat je van het album vindt. Altijd leuk, de mening van anderen. Oh ja, MP3 doe ik niet aan.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F2cF9o7FuU4