Undead Review: Annie

I'm gonna be away for a much-needed break this weekend (yes, this music reviewer is secretly an anime nerd). Which means that instead of the usual live reviews, on the 31st you can look forward to a CD review column including new releases by Deb Hornblow, End-Time Illusion, Omega Vague, and others. In the meantime, here's my last living-dead CD review (i.e. one that fell on the cutting room floor somewhere along the way!). Hope you enjoy it -- have a good weekend.

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Annie
Anniemal
Big Beat/Atlantic, 2005
http://www.anniemusic.co.uk/

What, Lassie? Pop’s been kidnapped?

Let’s be straightforward: Annie’s not going to save it, but she occasionally succeeds at transforming it into something enjoyable once again. Her debut, Anniemal, makes blissfully few concessions to the media, and the hype surrounding her release is largely grassroots. For starters, unlike Kylie (to whose voice Annie’s bears more than a passing resemblance), Annie puts on no airs about being one of the “beautiful people.” There’s no glitz or self-absorption; her persona on Anniemal seems the type you could meet in a bar or a class. And while her lyrics are hardly deep, they’re not vacuous, either. They actually tell stories rather than seduce that same old faceless, hypersexualized “you.” Like The Cardigans and Vanessa Carlton, there’s some substance mixed in with all the sweet.

Song-wise, Anniemal is hit-and-miss. The single “My Heartbeat” is catchy, understated retro, and “No Easy Love” rides an infectious bumpty-bump groove. Then again, “Come Together” takes seven minutes to go all of nowhere, and if the premise of a pop song called “Chewing Gum” doesn’t piss you off right from the title, the chew-boys-up-and-spit-‘em-out lyrics will. Please, ignore the reviewers who would make such songs into witty feminist reversals of male sexual privilege. They’re not. Anniemal is not dissertation material. Unlike M.I.A., whose (more danceable) 2005 release Arular also snuck its way into the hipster cachet, Annie is expressly apolitical. She wants to party, have sex, and sell records, and these themes carry the album.

Dance music is working its way back into the subcultures that expelled it as corporate tripe. Hey, if you’re too skinny to mosh, and too uncomfortable standing with your arms crossed for twenty-minute Explosions in the Sky songs, you gotta move to something, right? And between 2005’s surge in dance-punk and the cash cow known as The Postal Service, radical, indie-minded people are finally starting to feel less guilty about shaking their brilliant asses. Annie won’t herd pop skeptics off to the dance floor—but she might just inspire them to sing her songs into a broomhandle while sweeping. And that’s a step toward getting those “guilty pleasure” types to believe that there’s good pop out there—which there is, in spite of mass media messages to the contrary.