Review:
'ANEMO'
'SLOWBURN'
- Label: 'City Canyon Records'
- Genre: 'Rock'
- Release Date: '2005'
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Our Rating:
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There are whole Other Regions of the music industry where my critical faculties simply don't work.
ANEMO sound to me like an entity from these Other Regions. And listen as I might, I just don’t understand.
My times watching and listening to engineers in studios tell me that this is formidably well made stuff. Levels are artfully balanced and cunningly finessed. Hazelle Woodhurst's confident siren voice is seductively laid over some enormous guitar/drum powered rock pomp. That's the smell of money, I'd say. And the sound of serious professional expertise to boot. Well made for sure.
But after that, I'm lost. These are the sorts of lush and (I have to say) vacuous songs that open and close TV dramas. Their principal characteristic is their whiff of artificiality and disconnection. They're not easy to make – the artifice takes a lot of art. But they don't seem to be about anything or live in any community that I've ever encountered outside the fantasy world of glossy TV sit coms and Hollywood movies.
There was a point in time when San Francisco rock bands moved into mansions and became integrated into mainstream commerce. Where GRACE SLICK had stood on a windswept hillside on a makeshift stage and sung "White Rabbit" to crowds of the dazed and confused kids not so different from her grand self there was true magic in the air and all was possible. When she appeared under TV lights doing "We Built This City on Rock and Roll" the engineering was better, but the howl of expressive chaos had died a thousand deaths. Consumer Product was all.
What I'm saying is that aftershocks and echoes of intelligent rock and roll reverberate in "Slowburn" as in all the best rock/commerce collaborations ever since. With aesthetic, social and psychological experimentation removed what's left is the big sound and a series of pseudo-biographical stories of lives that really don’t matter. There's a moment in ANEMO tune "Tell Me Why" where an interesting North African lilt joins the standard noises off. But, pop-hop already gave me a god swatch of that this Summer – and it’s just another piece of opportunistic appropriation.
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Its no good complaiing to me that Charlotte Hatherley isn’t this good. I'm sure she isn’t. But somehow I think I can accept that section of the rock and role ecosystem as at least inhabiting some common ground with its excitable audience. This stuff is spookily alien in its cybernetically perfect imitation of chick rock/rock chic.
Currently on CDBaby, UK release is vaguely threatened for "early 2006". Perhaps by then an underground buzz will prove me more wrong than a Professor of Wrongness at the University of Wrong. I live in hope. But even the name "ANEMO" seems oddly anodyne and anaemic. And I still don’t understand.
You can see a video featuring the strangely unmenacing "Johnny Five" (it’s "about" an internet psychopath) at City Canyons' website.
www.citycanyons.com
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author: Sam Saunders
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READERS COMMENTS
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I think this is a pretty decent album. There will be inevitable comparisons with Garbage and Evanescence, who certainly seem to be an influence. There's a lot of different styles here, so the album lacks a definite identity. Having said that, I think there are a handful of great songs on 'Slowburn', including 'Johnny 5', 'Taken In', 'Made Of Fiction' and the title track.
------------- Author: mr_mcintyre
21 November 2005
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ANEMO
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