Anohni, formerly known as Antony of Antony and the Johnsons, is a singer-songwriter who has been making some of the most heartbreaking and emotional music you're liable to here for neary the past 15 years. Though her output has been pretty minimal (a few full length albums and just as many live albums) the music itself, at least the albums that I've heard all the way through have been incredibly beautiful works; all showing vulnerability, backed by some of the strongest pipes in the singer-songwriter world.
However, those albums were mostly piano led, or were accompanied by minimal instrumentation, and that's where this new album Hopelessness changes things up in a significant way. Sure, there's still piano. but it is now backed up by pulsating electronic basslines and the songs like "Watch Me" even have 'drops' of a sort, like the kind you'd find on a low-key EDM record. And this is all thanks to the production, which is handled by both Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never, both of whom have made a name for themselves in the modern electronic music landscape; the former specializing in banger beats, and the former opting for a lot more ethereal textures. However, on this record they both find themselves somewhere in the middle, and most of the tracks here are very low-key in their execution.
Which is fitting, because it gives room for Anohni's gruesome lyrics about drone bombings and other wartime atrocities to spread out and consume the listener. In fact, there's a pretty big stipulation that I should probably get out of the way if you are at all interested in giving this album a listen: this is a political album. Sure, the songs can still be enjoyed without the context of what they're about being clear, but I feel like the album's finest moments come from how cutting they are in terms of the subjects being conveyed in the lyrics. Such is the case with the first track here "Drone Bomb Me" which finds Anohni singing from the perspective of a middle-eastern girl who has bean decimated by a bombing, and the lyrics of this song involve gory depictions of the after effects, but also conveys an almost perverse sense of relief: it is a chilling song indeed.
Other fantastic moments include the paranoid, yet somehow comforted passages of "Watch Me" and the barbed questioning on the late album cut "Crisis". All of these songs are not only captivating from a lyrical standpoint, but the music behind them is perfectly balanced and really help sell the emotion; though Anohni's voice can certainly do that all on its own. She just has such a resonant, yet delicate voice, and I simply can't get enough of it.
But, this album does stumble pretty hard in spots. In fact, I'd say nearly half of this album is inconsistent, or has elements that really detract from the overall experience. This all starts with the track "I Don't Love You Anymore" which is a heavy moment, but the instrumentation just feels too flat, and Anohni's voice is in such a weird spot in the mix, almost like it's hiding behind something. Then there's the track "Obama" which is a sharp political monologue of sorts, but the melody that Anohni is singing is just so formless, and the track around it feels just as shapeless. Then there's the track "Violent Men" which seems more like an experiment than an actual song.
But these problems don't keep me from enjoying the album overall, and I highly recommend this LP to anyone who is up for a dark, political album that handles its points of view with a steady hand, and has some strong songs to boot.
7.8/10
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