Keren Ann - Keren Ann (Blue Note)
3/5
By: Alex Lee Thomson
When Keren Ann steps up to the mic in 'It's All A Lie', your life will change. Shivers will creep up your back, your hands will shake and you'll drop your jaw lower than it's ever gone before. You'll unplug the phone, stop blinking and crash to the floor. Your body will wobble, your ears pricked like a nervous puppy, waiting expectantly for something to happen, waiting for your life to hobble, and within 5 minutes you've already written off the next hour of your day to the devotion of 'Keren Ann', the self titled fifth studio album from the globe-trotting vocal monster who's proven yet again that music is more beautiful than any painting.
'It's All A Lie' is a barren and post-apocalyptic glimpse of starkness in music, with an incredible power masquerading as a whisper, transformed into poetry by way of this woman's chilling talent for delivery of words. You can feel the stab of her chorus, if you can call it that, slice into you with ever uttering, her voice cutting through the air with a teasing sharpness and pain. After an attack like this, the subtle strings and hand-clapping of 'Lay Your Head Down' is something of a comfort, bringing you out of the forecast shadows and into the daybreak of what quickly becomes one the most incredible female rendered albums of the year, if not the past several - or at least since Regina Spektors' last release. The shivering and delicate percussion loans an unease and discomfort that Keren's vocals sluice against with an understated lustre and surreal charm, not that distant from, (though far more revealing than) the aforementioned Spektor.
Ann's voice has a natural allure, not dramatically excessive or trying to stretch itself too thinly, just straightforwardly restrained and constantly captivating. At times you want her to raise her tone and get involved but as her songs shift into bolder territory it almost seems pointless, and the luxury of this album lies in the fact Ann manages to keep herself under wraps throughout, each song gaining posture organically and without pressure from volume-raising tricks and cheats. The rousing album opening starts to lose momentum as 'In Your Back' and 'Harder Ships' sail past with not much more than café-jazz acoustica to say for itself, but the 60s-esque undertone of 'It Ain't No Crime' jolts the album back into the dynamism that it started out to achieve. This is the first full-English language album Keren has penned and although the continental feel is still felt through the ridges of 'Where No Endings End', the fully comprehensible vocals (for us undereducated limeys) certainly make this her most significant release to date.
The only problem with this is that the first two tracks seem to be on a completely different level to the subsequent album, almost as though Keren woke up in the middle of the night having dreamt of the gargantuan harmonies, only to fall back asleep before finishing off her scripture. The latter tracks, the clatter of 'Between The Flatland' and the batter of 'Caspia' restore glory but truthfully; you spend ten minutes suspended above yourself only to be let down by all that follows. The vocal arrays here are faultless, constantly and brutally incredible, unquestionably, but by tearing down the walls so early on Keren allowed us to see a bit too deeply into this album only to find countless holes and wasted space. 'It's All A Lie' is almost worth the barrage of mediocrity, beautiful as it is, that follows - almost, but not quite. We can't recommend this whole album too much, or at least not with as much passion as we could the opening two numbers, both of which will be playing long into our middle ages. The fact remains however that for all it's hasten let-down, Keren Ann is probably among the most sophisticated female songwriters working today and just for that, give this some brakes and see if it takes.
Stream three tracks from 'Keren Ann' HERE.
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