The musician formerly Antony Hegarty returned with staggeringly beautiful protest songs that are escapist as well as subversive
As album titles go, you’d be hard pressed to find one more appropriate for 2016 than Hopelessness. It was a statement of despair – angry and unwavering, bold and unmistakably bleak, furious at the world. You’d also be hard pressed to find an album this year as fearlessly political – or at least one with a danceable song about execution. The artist formerly known as Antony and the Johnsons made her name with nimble piano torch songs, but for her first album as Anohni, she emerged as a velvet-voiced harbinger of doom, her anguish at drone warfare, climate change, Guantánamo Bay, the Obama administration and humanity at large set to an exuberant electronic soundtrack.
If that suggested an uneasy listen, then that was the point. At times Hopelessness could shake you to the core: the lyrics of Crisis, for example, were more brutal than a news report and the song had an emphatic crescendo of static and strings that made your ribcage want to burst. But the album succeeded in bringing such difficult subjects into the dance arena: it could be escapist as well as subversive.
Continue reading...by Kate Hutchinson via Electronic music | The Guardian
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