Album Review: The Anchoress - “The Art Of Losing”

 

An album that kind of slipped past me when it came out back in the spring, it seems apt that we're finally getting round to reviewing The Art Of Losing, the second album from Catherine Ann Davies aka the Anchoress as 2021 draws to a close as if there's any justice then this will be on several Album of the Year lists across the board.

The Art Of Losing is an album borne out of loss, grieving and some quite horrible personal traumas. Yet Davies takes these difficult subjects and winds them into gentle orchestrated lush sounding songs which wrap themselves around you like a soft blanket on a winter's day. Let It Hurt takes aim at misogyny and frustration beneath a gorgeous string-drenched backing similar to the desolate All Farewells Should Be Sudden while a duet with James Dean Bradfield on The Exchange (Davies has worked with the Manics as well as Bernard Butler among others in the past) soars through on glacial keyboards with the repeated refrain of "You're not to blame" like an arm around the shoulder.

This isn't a comfortable album to listen to by any means though - 5am's lyrics about rape and domestic abuse make for genuinely unsettling listening, brought into focus all the more clearly by the beautiful musical backing and the stripped down almost minimalist With The Boys is a fierce retort against a society which expects women to conform to the standards set in the media. It's not all piano based softness either - Show Your Face and the title track are powered along on bleeping synths which give way to chiming guitars reminiscent of Roxy Music or early Simple Minds (another group who Davies has collaborated with) while Unravel starts off with jabbing strings which give way to driving tribal drums while My Confessor starts off in almost bluesy territory before an explosion of feedback kicks in on the chorus.

Despite its often harrowing lyrical themes though, the overriding theme here is of defiance, of rising above and of staring down your demons and it makes for a thoroughly engaging album that you can lose yourself in for days at a time. A truly breathtaking album from a very talented individual, The Art Of Losing is a great record.

Bandcamp Link

NITE SONGS RATONG: 🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌑 (9/10)

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Garbage Days Revisited #29: The Quireboys - "Homewreckers And Heartbreakers" (2008)

Image
  "I played my hand in a rock 'n' roll band, it was my ace, my jack and my king/I rolled the dice to see what Lady Luck would bring, salvation or sin..."  - The Quireboys  - One For The Road In a way, I'm quite surprised I haven't covered the Quireboys either on Sounds From The Junkshop or here on Garbage Days Revisited yet. Unlike a lot of bands who were slung in with the "hair metal" tag in the late '80s and early '90s, I actually was  aware of the band when they had their brief flirtation with chart success around the turn of that decade and had a couple of their singles in my collection - Hey You  on a Now compilation (which sounds incredibly incongruous all these years later!) and There She Goes Again/Misled  on cassette single. For whatever reason though, they never quite became the firm favourites of mine that their fellow Soho dwelling glam rockers the Dogs D'Amour did. I'm not quite sure why - I think I just thought the Dogs
Read more

Garbage Days Revisited #74: Silverfish - "Organ Fan" (1992)

Image
  "You can't kill what you're afraid of...are you afraid of me?"  - Silverfish  - Big Bad Baby Pig Squeal I guess the obvious place to have written something on Silverfish would have been in one of the very early Sounds From The Junkshop but I'm ashamed to admit that they were a band who, while I was sort of aware of their presence at the time, I wouldn't really properly discover until well after they'd split.  I can remember the band name from the occasions they'd pop up on the Indie Top 10 on the ITV Chart Show but it was only when their singer Lesley Rankine cropped up as a guest vocalist on Therapy? 's Troublegum album (on Lunacy Booth  and Femtex ) that I decided to try and investigate their output in a bit more detail. Only to find they'd literally split up a few months before. Bugger. Silverfish hailed from Camden in the pre-Britpop days back when it was still the grimy scuzzy end of North London and the sort of place tourists would act
Read more

Album Review: Ming City Rockers - "Lime"

Image
  Hailing from Immingham near Grimsby (hence their name), the Ming City Rockers briefly looked like quite hot property a few years ago with their debut self-titled album being a prime slice of howled smalltown angst which picked them up enough plaudits to get Steve Albini in to produce the follow-up, 2016's  Lemon . And then...nothing. Seven years on from that sophomore effort and the group have returned, slimmed down to a three-piece and with a very noticeable change to their image. But the sound is very much the same with the sort of angry three-chord garage punk that made their debut such a good effort. The change seems to be that Lime  sees the Ming City Rockers taking their worldview out of the smalltowns and over to the nation as a whole. The sarky lead off single Jill Was An Anarchist  was a definite marker laid down and there's plenty more on Lime  where that came from such as the snarling Poor Old Jim  taking a swipe at alcoholic F*r*ge-supporting boomers ( "He us
Read more