Dark, challenging, otherworldly, experimental, ethereally oddball but at times alluring electronica and ghostly vocalisations? It’s the Tallahassee artist Hayden Anhedönia, who after the successful 2022 LP Preacher’s Daughter, pushes the musical envelope into most unusual territory. A very shadowy album for disturbing times, the musician is known for a less conventional childhood - a strict church upbringing and homeschooling and an earlier career influenced by Christian music and Gregorian chanting. Anhedönia has more recently courted controversy online with various social media comments on current affairs, as well as revealing her trans and autistic status. This release certainly feels like a rebellion against any accessible pop career.
With some tracks at 12 or 13 minutes, the album feels like the soundtrack to an extended, mysterious sequence in the darker bowels a David Lynch underworld, twisted through a prism of 80s post-industrial experimentation, and a collapsing echo of melancholia à la Lana Del Rey, with squint of crunched soundscapes distortedly reminiscent of Cocteau Twins. Extended near-silences, distorted noise and feedback, minimalistic piano, ghostly, disembodied vocals, such as on the opening an title track which begins with a bunker-sounding spiritual, and then extended periods of dirtied ambience, feels like entering a series of very dark, slightly terrifying indistinct chambers. You simply do not know what to expect, and for much of the time this is a mix of meditative and disturbing, but also strangely beautiful. The track Punish is perhaps the most accessible, has a beautiful melody and minimalist piano, while the guitar, piano and white noise of Etienne is rather soothing, before closing with an indistinct voice from a lost radio station. Pulldrone, Thatorchia, and Housofpsychoticwomn, for example, are certainly very odd indeed, immersing into difficult, but also fascinatingly nihilistic soundscapes. Is it an expression of mental turmoil, or a brilliant piece of creativity? Perhaps a mixture. Out on Daughters of Cain Records.
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