Every once in a while you read a review that describes the album in this manner: "it's like [insert currently trendy band here] meets [incredibly obscure, vanity band] being raped by a bunch of aliens." You can replace "being raped by a bunch of aliens" with "thrown in a blender" if you prefer your reviewers to be ashamed of their past Star Trek heritage. But either way, I always felt this was a lazy way of reviewing. I mean, who even really knows what a person sounds like when they're being raped by an actual alien?
And yet, Little Annie's latest album Songs from the Coal Mine Canary inspired this sort of criticism from me; just minus all of the musical vanity. Would you like to hear it? Brace yourself. This album sounds like an angry gypsy queen meets a lonely night club singer meets a crazy pirate bitch from hell.
And while that description certainly makes Songs from the Coal Mine Canary sound especially exciting, it doesn't really leave any room to consider whether it's good or not. And that's exactly the point. Little Annie infuses her album with such an aura of drama, excitement, and otherworldly fog that the listener is swept away in the majesty of her creation. It's akin to a piece of imagination: it simply exists, and to either praise it on the highest mountain or condemn it to the shit hells of your local K-mart dollar bin doesn't do this record the justice it deserves.
So what kind of judgment can be passed on Coal Mine Canary? Well, it is definitely not an album for those who dislike big sweeping statements or melodrama or flights of fancy. Nor is it an album for anyone with a disdain of spoken word poetry along the lines of Gertrude Stein. The kind of person Little Annie is meant to appeal to is the kind of person who has never entirely left the fortress of imagination. They want their music not to just be in the background; they want to be able to pretend along with it. They want to become the troubled, sultry night club singer in "Diamonds Made of Glass," the mythical pirate-queen personality which appears in "Absynthtee-ism" or on the "The Good Ship Nasty Queen," the gypsy-queen of a Miss Havisham in "Strange Love." Other people can appreciate this album, but the edges will rub them raw and keep them far apart from the red, purple, gold vision that is the new reality which Little Annie creates. This is a record meant for those who still succumb to flights of fancy, not for the weak of heart or for those with a strong hatred of the theatre. But what about anyone else? Well, they better run for their lives; the pirate bitches from hell are here!
Article comments
1 - Mark Saleski
dammit, that's one delicious review. seriously great stuff.