THE ANCHORESS – AS WE ONCE WERE: REVIEW
- 15 hours ago
- 3 min read
THE ANCHORESS
As We Once Were (Last Night From Glasgow)
FOR ALL ITS ABUNDANT, vital qualities, humour was not readily apparent in The Art Of Losing, Dr Catherine Anne Davies’ last album as The Anchoress. But then there was not a lot of room for it in subject matter that ranged from isolation forced and dementia observed to unalterable, unbearable death, even as the songs had, as I described at the time, music “that lifts and separates itself from any kind of pain porn”.
The same cannot be said for As We Once Were, whose tenor remains sober but whose affection for people pokes through and whose eyebrows sometimes arch with a touch of wickedness that can’t help but make you grin.
Certainly, it is a record where the familiar dramatic surges and almost hypnotic carries remain – All I Really Want Is Peace seems to float but well before its four minutes are over it is clear we are tethered to it and travelling alongside with a strange but unmistakeable pleasure; the sensual and dark Throw Over Your Man rolls forward with some of the compressed fervour of Manic Street Preachers, whose James Dean Bradfield is a guest once again, alongside the ghost of Virginia Woolf; and the musical romanticism of What You Did is only partly a comforter when set against the frank catalogue of trespasses against the narrator by an unnamed but impactful former lover.
However, it has in a couple of places – most notably in Du Temps Perdu, the album’s introductory instrumental minute, and the closing Happiness Don’t Show Up Like It Should (Epilogue) but also, strikingly gently, midway through the record at the beginning of Stop The World – recovered recordings of her grandmother and the playful, joyful sound of a child simply being a child, gestures that tell you something about the intermingling of past and present and the fluidity of any passage of time in these songs, and something more about the tenor of Davies herself some years on.
Then, Davies throws in a wryly mocking slam of the (sometimes well-meaning, most often ignorant) rubbish said to and about new mothers in the self-explanatory I Had A Baby Not A Lobotomy – aided by Gwenno – and you have to laugh. Well laugh while riding a Eurythmics-like pulsing electronic drive that is not a recreation of the ‘80s so much as a reminder of the routes to freedom we were promised then.
What hasn’t changed between The Art Of Losing and As We Once Were is Davies’ control – of her voice, of her sound, of her musical storytelling. The piano-led Happiness Don’t Show Up Like It Should finds her in echo/conversation with herself as air whips around “them” evocatively, All Fall Down carries us down a wet road without lights, and She Knows Her Place is almost a courtly waltz whose shaky overhead light swings us into and out of the graspable and understandable. The growing disquiet of Hand To The Tide – “I can feel it coming/I know it’s here” – is in the almost imperceptible gaining of pace that becomes serious steps of heaviness, the way the suspended guitar pulls at you, and how her voice grows more distant but less detached in the middle eight and then retakes the centre in the final minute. What in lesser hands might be merely atmospheric or heading to portentous becomes a whole small world.
The grandeur of parts of this album is revealed to be as much in the spaces as the instrumentation, while the closeness of it all does not reveal itself in one glance but in the accumulation of intimacies. Yes, it is cleverly done, but better still there’s something captivating in the way Davies lets us see in but not through until we are immersed.
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APPLE MUSIC: Listen to The Anchoress – As We Once Were
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