Anna B Savage: You & i are Earth.
City Slang
Out Now
Anna B Savage, previously of London Town, now resident in Ireland, is currently on tour and playing in Manchester (Night And Day Café) on the 13th of February. This is your reason for attendance: a gorgeous, intimate mix of Joni and Van with its own unique brilliance, a story of finding your hearts home. MK Bennett basks in its sunshine.
As a rule, being in love is not a shortcut to chart success. Our greatest art tends toward the miserable, haunted grey, from Shakespeare to The Smiths, our exports demand a particular weathered distance, a knowing lack of joy that we find solace in. Not that we especially love unhappiness, but there is a certain beauty in its lack of surprises. A reflective stoicism to get you through the Winter days, a stiff upper lip covered by a scarf. Anna’s previous album, in|Flux, is a different beast to this, joyful desperation, its beautiful darkly honest poetry is the sound of a relationship dying in slow motion, with little acceptance from either side that it’s over. It is a sensual, intimate thing with the music acting as background and foreground, the occasional modernism or slow dance beat embellishing the words and pushing the narrative forward. And the last line, after all that she bears witness to, is “I think I’m gonna be fine”.
Continuing that theme, her art and life seem to have evolved into something centred, sublime, and spiritual, as if she had swum a great ocean and the waters were healing and holy. The instrumentation is sparse now, and what amounts to a narrative in the first person unfolds wonderfully and naturally throughout the runtime. More folk-based than her recent records, the honesty, openness, and trust she gives the listener allows them to understand and believe this translation from the land to the sea and back again, to the song.
Talk To Me, soundtracked by the landed and the soaring bird, is a beauteous whisper, a tentative step where you can hear the skin breaking on an open mouth, an acoustic waltz into promise. It sets the scene for this Irish travelogue and love story. Veiled in allegory before cutting back to the literal meaning, it is almost a swoon, a sound of love. Lighthouse reminds you that this whispered Black Pepper voice, cracking quietly with a high Joni softness, can be playful too, as she sings of solitude in pairs and triplets, her, her lover and the sea, the lover as the north star.
The music is subtle, with backing vocals and pianos allowing the melodies to shine but still adding soft colours to the mix. Donegal, on the face of it, is a song of moving and moving on, an upbeat song with instrumentation local to its environment, it is a yearning and questioning thing, unsure of itself but hopeful, expectant. Big & Wild could be a metaphor for man, dog, relationship or sea; it is one of several songs that reach Cohen’s peaks of excellence in atmosphere, the fusion folk always pushing it forward, and the exquisite aching vocal is never less than perfect. The further in, the more ruralised it becomes, as Mo Cheol Thu` (Gaelic for You Are My Music, sometimes You Are My Darling or I Love You, all of which are fitting here) tells a story of adoration and trust, you are nervous with her, no knowledge of how the story ends, as the music echoes Astral Weeks, and you keep your fingers crossed for the next three minutes of beauty.
Incertus comes next, a brief acoustic interlude, and also the name Seamus Heaney adopted when first publishing his poetry, broadly meaning unsure or uncertain, it may be reflected in how Heaney thought of himself in his early writing days, more likely a subtle irony, as Heaney was surefooted in his work and ambition. There is a valid argument that Anna’s work, and especially You & i are Earth, is a continuation, at least a striving, a reaching toward Heaney’s work, something that finds solace in the open, salted air, the fossilised and forgotten paths through the beach to the sea, the sometimes political but always personal meaning of your feet on the ground, a pureness of connection to the Earth.
I Reach For You In My Sleep follows this ideal, a tale of the twisting of limbs into love, and by the time she sings “God, I love you”, barely audible and yet a lion’s roar, gentle as peach fuzz, while at the same time, the hissing of summer lawns swells like broken waves behind, you need to keep yourself to yourself else it breaks you too. Agnes, along with the help of Anna Mieke, is a song of magic, motherhood/womanhood, the empty woodlands as a nurturer, a sprite as sister or ghost, aloneness as an act of rebellion, all and none of these things. The voices entwine perfectly here, eerie like smoke snaking through concrete.
You & i are Earth nearly completes these stories of happiness and contentment, the deep rumble of something underneath the music, underneath the soil, and a verse maybe worthy of Heaney.
“Where roots combine in dirt,
We’re earth,
Near where you had your first kiss,
You show me fading trails you miss,
With pebble clinking pockets,
We see bog cotton and new grown forests.
Through it all, the backing is a wonderful compliment to the peerless voice, whether pixel-clear or charcoal smudge, always poised in its rightful place. The Rest Of Our Lives ends the album appropriately, with the hope that this loop plays ad infinitum while the story of these migrant birds runs on long past the end of the page.
Anna’s Facebook | Instagram | Website
All words by MK Bennett, you can find his author’s archive here plus his Twitter and Instagram
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