As an artist who began her career studying experimental theatre in New York, went on to sing with Lou Reed, Björk and Yoko Ono, won the Mercury Prize singing piano-led chamber pop with the band now known as Anohni and the Johnsons, and was last seen making icy electronic music about climate change and modern warfare, it’s hardly surprising that Anohni’s latest release is another left turn.
The Johnsons are her backing band again for the first time since the Swanlights album in 2010, but the main collaborator is Scottish guitarist and producer Jimmy Hogarth, best known for his work in the soul pop world with Amy Winehouse, Corinne Bailey Rae and Duffy. The sound is dominated by his casually strummed electric guitar and Anohni’s whipped cream voice, with an improvised feel created by the fact that three or four songs were finished a day, and many of the vocal tracks are first takes.
Anohni’s voice is so grand and strange that she doesn’t need much in the way of instrumentation for a song to sound special. However, she has set herself up with a comparison to possibly the greatest album of all time, Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On, against which she can’t help but fall short.
Born in the year Gaye’s album was released, 1971, there are echoes of his environmental sorrow in much of Anohni’s work, and here especially on Why Am I Alive Now?, which finds her lamenting for “Birds and insects looking for a place to hide.” A restrained string section adds to the soulful feel, though the absence of horns makes this feel like something other than a purely retro exercise.
Instead there is real anger in the brief Go Ahead, where she yells: “Go ahead and burn it down/Go ahead, kill your friends” over harsher guitar chords and an aggravated squealing sound that turns out to be the sampled cry of a lemur. On the simple, stark It’s My Fault, she tortures herself: “It’s my fault the way I broke the earth.” In contrast, Sliver of Ice zooms in on a tiny sad detail, recalling a conversation with Lou Reed about the unforseen joy he found in sucking an ice cube as he neared death.
Much more strident on her last album, Hopelessness, here she mostly sounds resigned and mournful. When the guitar hits a blues rock squall at the end of Rest it’s all a bit much, but there’s always magic in that voice whatever the backdrop.
