Following 2021’s superb debut LP, A Common Turn, the London-based singer-songwriter returns with an exquisitely beautiful, bittersweet, intimate, candid personal release about the difficulties of love. Mixing acoustic instruments including woodwind this is a gorgeously mature fusion of folk and electronica, deftly and brilliantly produced by Mike Lindsay of Tunng. Opener Ghost is about the struggles of trying to forget an ex, the song capturing the passage of still-haunted time from four to six years later and onwards like ongoing form of grief. The title track intimately reveals a lack of orgasm sex with an angry lover, before skipping ecstatically into gentle beats and keyboard riff, expressing a different sense of release and being “happy to be on my own”. The album subtly explores the difficulties of desire, and nuances of relationships not quite working, failure to learn lessons, of wanting someone when they don’t want you and vice versa or simply not making the move (such as Hungry, or Feet of Clay, or the intensely yearning Touch Me). With many other standouts including I Can Hear Birds Now, Pavlov’s Dog, Crown Shyness, and closing track The Orange, in which she comes to terms with solitude and referring Wendy Cope’s poem about simple happiness, perhaps her finest song to date, it’s a fabulous album, full of great intensity, dark, confessional humour, and especially marked again Anna’s extraordinary voice that can whisper, go deep, then soar with rich intensity, like a female Jeff Buckley. Potentially the most gorgeous release of the year. Out on City Slang.
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