New Anohni Will Punch You In The Face To Gain Your Attention

Customers, we are in troubled times. The world is rift between various ‘us’ and ‘them’. Rich versus poor, the safe often versus those seeking safety, One Nation voters versus anyone with more than half a brain. So as the year drifts away, may we suggest some compromise? What the world needs is a thinking man’s Coldplay, a less deliberately pretentious Radiohead. And so we welcome back Elbow – reconvening after Guy Garvey did the obligatory solo album, and having misplaced their drummer in the interim. Magnificent (She Said) (Fiction) has a lot of what makes them, er, magnificent – even allowing for an obviously more programmed drum line. More Peter Gabriel than Genesis, if you will. Garvey puzzles and doubts, but somehow it all ends up uplifting and in your head. 

For subtlety is a thing much lacking at this time of year. And in this hemisphere, it’s rarely ‘lovely weather for a sleigh ride together’, let alone in December. And while Low come from Minnesota, where the local Mr Plow is probably salting the streets as we speak, their take on the often obligatory yuletide song doesn’t make you want to choke someone on their tinsel. Some Hearts (At Christmas Time) (Sub Pop) is reflective in their plaintive way – a muse on change and loss. A hymn for head and heart. And only 16 years since they last did a Christmas EP – that one offering the best take on Little Drummer Boy since Bowie knocked on Bing Crosby’s door a similar period before.    

Or you can even go deeper and darker. Where pop music might end, and a true ache from the heart and guts is made musical. Anohni – the former Antony of The Johnsons if you still haven’t caught up – now makes music that is simply confronting and utterly unrepentant in the protests it makes. Despite its title, Obama (REBIS/Rough Trade) is not the farewell song of praise you might expect, even as America drives itself to hell in a handcart of its own reality TV making. Anohni’s amazing voice is even different here – the words almost sticking in her near throat-singing as she pleads the case for military whistleblower and wikileaker Chelsea Manning’s release from her many prisons. This is not music as a commodity. It’s the punch in the face to gain your attention and empathy. 

It’s a sad reflection of my pop-cultured nature that every time I read the band name Hollow Everdaze, it feels like a rejected name for a character in The Hunger Games. However, their press release self-description as ‘Bacchus Marsh rock lords’ gives me a new regular touchstone when thinking of them. While there is that currently fashionable folk feeling to Still Ticking (Independent) the string lines are central to the songs structure and hooks, rather than just being the pillow for it to softly land upon. This makes and different, and good. 

On another slight tangent while having ‘folk’ among the descriptors, South Africa’s Cherilyn MacNeil in her Dear Reader guise. I Know You Can Hear It (City Slang/Inertia) is weary but pretty clockwork waltz, her voice also having that feeling of questioning and a thought process not quite complete. In an idiosyncratic throwback to earlier times, Ms MacNeil also records direct to tape, with no edits possible – you focus and get it right, or you start all over again. An anachronism in these auto-tuned days, but one that does add to its charms. 

Then there’s folk with some loops just to keep you slightly off-balance. Kill The Darling’s Tasha Lloyd has a voice that wafts over those sometimes contradictory noises to make The Tower, Our World, And Its Lovers (Independent) a thing of curiosity-inducing discomfort, as ‘Silver-haired ladies cross the desert’ with the wordy unfurling well visualised with a clip shot on a crowd-funded budget off in the Strathbogie Ranges, with a feeling somewhere between Picnic At Hanging Rock and a George Romero movie, with no blood capsules. Although the music is certainly not bloodless.  

The summer festival season will be missing one of its most omnipresent names with the retirement of the Jinja Safari name, but the various elements thereof will obviously re-emerge in varying manners. Early cab off the rank, drummer Jacob Borg as the niftily titled Berlin Bar Hounds. The percussion isn’t really redolent of his previous drum-stool, coming in skittering drum loops on Rapport (Independent), with overlapping layers conversational vocal which suggest there might be some of The National’s works in his Spotify playlists. This is not necessarily a bad thing either.

Since we seem to be having more locality mentions than the average David Attenborough documentary this week, let’s add Borneo to the list. Although they’re from Sydney, and make a happily scruffy punkish noise with a little jangle and occasional organ squelch to add some individuality. Hold Me In The River (GD FRNDS) comes with the requisite chorus you can yell along to, and while it’s all suitably silly there might even be a bit of a message in there as well. There might even be some Regurgitator eccentric thinking in there – and that’s not often a bad thing either.