Laurie Anderson: Homeland (Nonesuch)

 |   |  <1 min read

Laurie Anderson: Strange Perfumes
Laurie Anderson: Homeland (Nonesuch)

From the accompanying DVD, you sense this should have been a double CD for us to fully appreciate the long arc and nuances of this, Anderson's first album in a decade.

Anderson's work is allusive rather than literal or descriptive, but in these often disturbing, melancholy and dislocated meditations on the state of her country, some thread is missing between her feeling “homeland” has fascistic as well as mom'n'apple pie qualities (as she says in the DVD film The Story of the Lark about how the album developed).

As always Anderson's voice – cool, disembodied and, in the case of her alter-ego Fenway Bergamot, masculine – is engrossing. The musical settings of strings, exotic vocals from Tuvan singer Aidysmaa Koshkendey and electrobeats of haunting minimalism are equally so.

Anderson imbues small things like snowfall and sleep with great import – which means the big issues of foreign policy, words (“In America we like solutions,” she says before listing hair solutions alongside debt and world solutions) and characters in social or spiritual motion can go simply suggested.

The idea of memory is prevalent, and this works best when it engages with more simple, human concerns (the hypnotic Falling) than when it aims for the Big Picture (the disco-churn of Only An Expert) or on Bergamot's discourse Another Day in America.

So, an epic reduced to sketches, a concept rendered manageable – to its cost.

Share It

Your Comments

post a comment

More from this section   Music at Elsewhere articles index

Waco Brothers and Paul Burch: Great Chicago Fire (Bloodshot)

Waco Brothers and Paul Burch: Great Chicago Fire (Bloodshot)

Sounding like uncles who grew up on country-punk, Joe Ely's Texas rebel rock and some early Seventies Stones albums, the rootsy but rocking Waco Brothers here pull few surprises out of those... > Read more

Aaradhna: Treble and Reverb (Frequency)

Aaradhna: Treble and Reverb (Frequency)

Although critics and commentators will inevitably, and rightly, point out the influence of Amy Winehouse in a couple of place on this, Aaradhna's third album, that doesn't change the fact that this... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Various Artists: Saoco! (Vampi Soul/Southbound)

Various Artists: Saoco! (Vampi Soul/Southbound)

Subtitled “The bomba and plena explosion in Puerto Rico 1954-66”, this double disc ensures your library of bomba and plena just got a shelf-filler. For most of us, myself included,... > Read more

THE BARGAIN BUY: Fargo, The Complete First Season (DVD)

THE BARGAIN BUY: Fargo, The Complete First Season (DVD)

Just as the television series Fargo -- based on the Coen brothers much acclaimed mid-Nineties film of the same name -- started screening in New Zealand, a well placed television critic went into... > Read more