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

Paul Kelly: Nature (Universal)

Paul Kelly: Nature (Universal)

The first important things to be said about Nature – Paul Kelly's 24thstudio album – is that the first two singles, With The One I Love and A Bastard Like Me (For Charlie Perkins), are... > Read more

The Doors: Live at the Bowl '68 (Warners)

The Doors: Live at the Bowl '68 (Warners)

Anyone charting the career trajectory of the Doors would doubtless have it as a rapidly rising inverted V with an equally sudden if rather more bumpy decline after the peak and perhaps a little... > Read more

Elsewhere at Elsewhere

Katchafire: Legacy (Universal)

Katchafire: Legacy (Universal)

Many contemporary writers with long memories or those with a decent understanding of music history quite rightly point out that when reggae emerged out of the poorest areas of Jamaica it was the... > Read more

DORY PREVIN, REFLECTIONS IN A MUD PUDDLE, CONSIDERED (1971): Death, pain, disasters and really nice songs

DORY PREVIN, REFLECTIONS IN A MUD PUDDLE, CONSIDERED (1971): Death, pain, disasters and really nice songs

Any number of women artist from the Sixties and Seventies – Vashti Bunyan, PP Arnold, Doris Troy and others – have undergone a career revival or rediscovery in recent years. But... > Read more