This superb new album by Annie Clark is inspired by the look, sounds and feel of grimy early 70s New York, creating a work of of sleazy sophistication, with the sound of electric sitar, Steely Dan, and its title referring to release of her father from prison in 2019. That event, when she picked him up from incarceration occurred after a decade-long sentence for stock-manipulation, is marked by an ironically humorous title track song and which mocks how her father is no kind of “daddy” in the innuendo sense or otherwise at all, the song described the event in a sexy, but caustic cabaret jazz-funk feel - “Yeah you did time but I did some time too.” It is filled with needling, edgy humour.
Opener and single Pay Your In Pain is a brilliant peace of dirty funk about being down and out, while to keep that theme, the free-flowing Down and Out in Downtown really captures the look and feel of New York with the sitar-guitar sound of Steely Dan, flutes, and soaring choruses. The overall musicality of the album is much looser and more freeform and noodly than the more rigid, robotic pop of the her although brilliant last album Masseduction. It is as if she, along with co-producer and musician Dan Antonoff, who plays drums and a variety of keyboards throughout, are able to be both precise and free in their playing, something loucher, more relaxed, giving a sense of being world-weary yet emancipated.
As referenced on the blonde image on the cover, Clark captures the look and voice of John Cassavetes movie heroines, as his name mentioned in the song The Laughing Man. But she also references many of her own musical heroines – Joni Mitchell, Nina Simone, Tori Amos and Joan Didion on the sublime gospel-infused The Melting of the Sun, which also echoes musically Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. Between that track and The Laughing Man, there is also a curious interlude, a nod to her mother’s lifelong habit of humming random, unknown tunes in the kitchen, something, Annie says, if they only had been recorded, might have been the source of many brilliant melodies. On that note of subconscious influence, sax-filled My Baby Wants A Baby became an accidental slower echo of 9 to 5, the hit sung by Sheena Easton, and led to its writer, Florrie Palmer, getting a co-credit. There are also strains of Sly and the Family Stone, Stevie Wonder and 1974 Labelle concert at the Metropolitan Opera in New York across the album Overall, this is a release of masterful sound and musicianship, blearily brilliant, filled with dark humour, atmosphere, and beautiful tones. Outstanding. Out on Loma Vista.
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