Post by Ras Berry on Jan 22, 2011 22:47:53 GMT
Originally recorded at Southern Studios in 1983, Little Annie's Soul Possession was brought back to our studios in 2010 and remastered by Harvey Birrell. Soul Possession has been reissued and beautifully repackaged with brand new artwork from Little Annie's own paintings. The CD is packaged in a digipack and comes with extensive liner notes from Robert R Conroy, which shed light into the events around the recording. Also available in this series of reissues are Little Annie's Jackamo and Short and Sweet.
Annie had always loved reggae and dub, but now – living in London – she was soaking in the stuff. The Crass crew already knew Sherwood (On-U Sound), and he and they both recorded at Southern Studios in London. Sherwood and Annie met, and got on like the proverbial house on fire. An LP, joint venture of both On-U Sound and Crass’ Corpus Christi label, came into being. It was called Soul Possession and was unleashed in 1983.
Soul Possession is easily the most extreme LP Annie has released to date – an unsettled and unsettling collection of rhythmic soundscapes, over which Annie intones some of her most grim and grisly lyrics. Soul Possession is not about beauty, though it does have some dark, lovely moments. It is an album that has a political point to make, and it does so very, very effectively. It is a brutal reflection of the brutality of modern life. It is steeped in the aesthetic mindset of Crass – indeed collective members Penny Rimbaud, Pete Wright and Eve Libertine are featured players.
Annie, the chanteuse, is just in her formative stages here, and her breathy/breathless rants have more in common with the urgent vocal delivery of Alan Vega or Don Van Vliet than they do with Judy Garland. Sherwood’s production is an evil wonder – a haunted house full of bubbling baselines, eerie electronics and clattering graveyard percussion. ‘Closet Love’ sets the scene for the LP, a gently funky bass spars with a jittery drum machine and an abrasive keyboard, while Annie coos a nightmare scenario of lovers ripping each other apart/rotting in each others’ arms.
‘Third Gear Kills’ has a great, grim groove and Annie spins a hypnotic tale of automotive violence and sex, à la JG Ballard’s Crash. ‘Turkey Girl’ feels like an explicit homage to Captain Beefheart. It boasts a catchy melody and the most traditional song structure on the LP, but the lyrics are a monstrous parody of the tales of male sexual prowess one might find in a blue blues song. (“Wanna slice my cock on your pop top”, the clearly deranged narrator barks at his “turkey fuck girl”.) ‘Burnt Offerings’ calls to mind Mark Stewart and his Maffia, and punctuates its tale of torture and mind control with a sad piano melody, which helps make Annie’s performance all the more harrowing.
‘To Know Evil’ advances on the listener like some huge, mutant reptilian monster, before settling into an evil, repetitive groove over which Annie catalogues the horrors of war. Strangely Annie abandons her vocal duties entirely for ‘Sad Shadows’, giving the song over to Crass’ Eve Libertine who gives her best angry-ghost-howling-in-the-wind delivery to Annie’s images of female oppression. The song is both haunting and haunted and grows oddly funky as it progresses.
‘Viet Not Mine, El Salvador Yours’ may well be this scary album’s scariest moment, with its horror movie soundtrack/backing track and Annie’s flock of harpies multi-track vocals – of which Diamanda Galás might well have been proud. The final track, ‘Waiting for the Fun’, arrives with evil bass lines, funky drums and another hornets’ nest of vocals – which return again and again to an oddly plaintive, folk song melody.
Critics were effusive with their praise. Clearly this was the work of an artist to be reckoned with.
For those ‘in the know’, Annie Anxiety was now a known quantity. She never did make it to Berlin – she would live in London for the next decade. She would soon abandon her post in the Crass collective, and be issued a card to carry indicating her position as resident diva for the On-U Sound crew. A dub chanteuse would emerge.
Right place, right time.
But that’s another story…
Robert R Conroy
New York City, September 2010
Taken from Robert R Conroy's notes for the insert of this reissue of Soul Possession
Remastered at Southern Studios in 2010 by Harvey Birrell, Little Annie's 1987 album Jackamo has been reissued and beautifully repackaged with brand new artwork from Little Annie's own paintings. The CD is packaged in a digipack and comes with extensive liner notes from Robert R Conroy, which shed light into the events around the recording. Also available in this series of reissues are Little Annie's Short and Sweet and Soul Possession.
Jackamo is probably one of the best LPs you have never heard, but once within its realm tread lightly and carefully. Here there be monsters. The great American author of weird fiction, HP Lovecraft, once remarked that for a tale of terror to be truly memorable “(a) certain atmosphere of breathless and unexplainable dread of outer, unknown forces must be present”. Such outer, unknown forces are at play here. Annie took her own personal fear and pain, and transmuted same into something existential.
This is truly music from the haunted dancehall. ‘Unexplainable dread’ – in both the Edgar Allen Poe and Lee ‘Scratch’ Perry sense of this term – runs riot. But what keeps this LP from sliding into the pit of its own dark night of the soul is Annie herself – her pluck, her humor, her graceful facility with the English language and most of all her humanity.
The LP commences with a subtle apocalypse, a sledgehammer wrapped in velvet, a confession, a manifesto, a masterwork. ‘As I Lie in Your Arms’ is a truly amazing song, a sprawling, astonishing amalgam of dub groove and Caligari cabaret. Few tunes have so perfectly captured the horror of that 3am-hour-of-the-wolf-insomnia when the waking nightmares come calling. When the uneasy sleeper is suddenly aware and starts asking those most horrible of questions: “Am I really happy?’, ‘Was it all worth it?” and “What have I done?”.
Against Wimbish’s gently insistent/life-support baseline, Noah’s clattering percussion and the ghostly, elegant piano melody of Yamamoto, Annie intones this – what? Monologue? Colloquy? A ‘sugary soliloquy of lust’? She lays in the arms of her lover and can lie no longer. A gorgeous litany of dislocated disappointment pours forth. The aching, ragged beauty of Annie’s vocals are surpassed only by the brutal/gorgeous precision of her words. “As anxious night turns to endless day and nightmares turn to daydreams, we will crawl across the floor and laugh at all the splinters”.
Meanwhile Sherwood drapes the whole proceedings in a groovy/ghostly dub shroud. The rest of the album could have been blank and the LP would have still been a major work just for this track alone.
But the remainder of Jackamo is anything but blank and/or filler. One has barely a moment to recover from the quiet devastation of the first song before the vicious, jittery assault of the second. ‘Bastinado’ is a form of torture that consists of beating the soles of a prisoner’s feet. In Annie’s skilled, bloody hands the practice becomes an emblem for the rampant violence of the modern world, which she lays out in a laundry list that is both hideous and blackly hilarious.
‘Chasing the Dragon Down Broadway’ is a Harold Pinter-play-bad-trip-tribal-stomp to a blaring soundtrack of Captain Beefhart and Martin Denny. Then the monstrous title track arrives. Quoting Mr. Lovecraft again, the author suggests that the truly ‘weird’ in art commands “a subtle attitude of awed listening, as if for the beating of black wings or the scratching of outside shapes and entities on the known universe‘s utmost rim”. He could have been describing the song Jackamo. It is a beautiful nightmare, a sumptuous, evil, sonic vortex that pulls the listener down into a netherworld of bat squeaks, psychedelic soundscapes and graveyard tablas. Meanwhile, Annie’s rantings echo in the distance, sounding like Judy Garland babbling through some late-night set in a bar full of mugwumps in William Burroughs’ Interzone.
Released to rapturous reviews on the fledgling British indie label One Little Indian, Jackamo should have set the world on its ear. But as luck would have it, another band on One Little Indian happened to release a record at just about the same time as Annie did. The label was utterly blind-sided by the sudden, huge success of the Sugarcubes’ first LP. In the ensuing months, as the label scrambled to deal with its new megstars, other releases on the label – including Jackamo – got lost in the shuffle.
Robert R Conroy
New York City, September 2010
Taken from Robert R Conroy's notes for the insert of this reissue of Jackamo.
Remastered at Southern Studios in 2010 by Harvey Birrell, Little Annie's 1992 masterpiece Short and Sweet has been reissued and beautifully repackaged with brand new artwork from Little Annie's own paintings. The CD is packaged in a digipack and comes with extensive liner notes from Robert R Conroy, which shed light into the events around the recording. Also available in this series of reissues are Little Annie's Jackamo and Soul Possession.
Short and Sweet is the sound of a clutch of tremendously talented musicians applying themselves to the task of making 'pop music', and demanding said musical form rise to their high standards – as opposed to said musicians watering down what they do. Short and Sweet is likewise a much more explicitly accessible collection of tunes when compared with either of Annie's previous LPs, Soul Possession and Jackamo, but it remains an album of startling style and wit. Wimbish and McDonald (Sugarhill Gang/Tackhead/Dub Syndicate) are endlessly inventive here, creating a series of sprawling, rolling, funky rhythm tracks infused with booby traps of dub production, blues guitar and middle/east Asian instrumentation. The music is the perfect soundtrack for life in London at the time, and the perfect miseen-scene for Annie to portray her domestic comedies/tragedies within.
And Annie is very much ready for her close-up here, Mr DeMille. Like all truly great artists she makes it look easy, she makes it sound simple – like these rants and prayers, tirades and seductions are all just falling off the top of her head. The off-hand skill of her vocal delivery sometimes masks her incredibly precise use of language, her ability to take a turn of phrase and turn it back on itself or to pull a cliché inside out. And always this return to ambivalence over her circumstances – finding herself on the floor waiting for the next shoe to drop, realising that her find romance has just reached its expiration date or that she is a one-man woman looking for the man that got away – because she's scared he might come back!
'I Think of You', 'Everything and More', 'Going For Gold' and 'Watch the World Go By': each perfectly captures that moment when the milk and honey of domestic bliss begins to curdle. In 'Bless Those (Little Annie's Prayer)' a rowdy chorus of Annies bestow their benedictions on all aspects of the population, while an unnerving horn sample suggests just how necessary such blessings are in this big bad world. She is voracious in 'Give it to Me', vicious in 'Little Man' and a punch-drunk Stepford Wife trying – unconvincingly – to convince herself she's happy in 'Prisoner of Paradise'. With 'You and the Night and the Music' she returns to the boiling pitch black humor/grisly imagery of Jackamo.
But the real masterpiece here is the LP's finale, 'If Cain Were Able'. “The flowerbeds all look so nice this time of year, though the night still holds a chill”, Annie coos against a stately piano sample and ominous squibs of synthesizer – setting the stage, a nocturnal vigil for a lover who has walked out the door. It is a true tour de force, as the singer runs the gauntlet from sadness to desperation to anger to blind rage, the backing track perfectly reflecting her mood and growing into a full-on film noir groove. (The song is noteworthy as Annie's first foray into producing, along with engineer Richard Norris.)
The LP was released to rapturous reviews. After a performance in NYC with one of her idols, Grace Jones -Annie's first gig in New York in 13 years – a routine of touring commenced. Having previously returned to New York City – primarily to visit her friend Charles Schwartz, who was succumbing to complications from HIV infection – Annie found herself more taken with the town than she had imagined she would be, despite the sad circumstances.
Had there been any justice Annie would have arrived as a major pop star. But the vagaries of public taste, combined with On-U Sound's limited wherewithal, thwarted Annie's hoped-for breakthrough. She remained a respected cult figure, and new horizons beckoned. As the 1990s progressed Annie would leave On-U Sound, London and her husband, relocate to New York City and fully embrace her chanteuse/cabaret leanings. Collaborations with the likes of Antony Hegarty and Paul Wallfisch and great LPs would follow.
But that's another story...
Robert R Conroy
New York City, September 2010
Taken from Robert R Conroy's notes for the insert of this reissue of Short and Sweet.
Available Monday 31st January - go buy them all!!!
