(2020) Anne Malin - Waiting Song


Review:
Anne Malin sings in an old-fashioned, tremulous way, with plenty of vibrato and sudden piercing clarity. Her album Waiting Song takes its time to get going, her partner William Johnson building shadowy, pre-war atmospheres in skeletal drums, guitar, organ and pedal steel around her flickering, fluttering melodies. In fact, it’s not really until the title track, four cuts in, that you sit up and take notice. This song has a stately hymn-like melody that moves steadily, without any hurry or drama, hedged in by two guitars, one altered so that the notes flare and vibrate, the other a pedal steel leaving ghost-like traces of tone, like those eerie graveyard photos that show a faint, inexplicable glow. “Oh, I’ll stand by window/yes, I’ll stand by the window/and sing a waiting song,” croons Malin, and it’s easy to imagine a shadow in the window of a long-abandoned house, materializing and then gone. Malin has an MFA in poetry, so her lyrics are elliptical and evocative. In “Empty Is the Day,” against a whistling lonesome keyboard that moves in and out of focus and glistening drops of glockenspiel, she observes, “How empty is the day/like a mirror you can’t save/like a portal you push through/like a face you’re not used to.” Her voice is anything but modern, a wax cylinder sound that evokes faith and sorrow and fortitude. She sounds a bit like Kate McGarrigle and Josephine Foster, but perhaps the better comparison is Kath Bloom because of the striking atmospheres of altered blues-folk guitar sound that Johnson wafts around her. He’s not Loren Connors — no one is — but there’s a similar haunted, evocative way with experiment around folk-grounded songs. These songs have a fey, otherworldly quality, none more so than piano-led “Pearly Sleigh,” where Malin sings, “I don’t wear ghosts like jewelry/I don’t need haunting inside me/but I will not forget thee/mirrored eternity,” as Johnson interposes muted buzz-saw guitar tones in the intervals. Malin tries some spoken word in “Mountain Song,” as Johnson builds unsettling dissonances in the air around her; the cut chills like a campfire ghost story, but also insists that you pay attention to the way the words fall. Waiting Song is a promising opening salvo from a duo that balances wordplay with a-verbal experience in a very striking way.


Tracklist:
01 - Empty Is the Day
02 - Child
03 - Sleep
04 - Waiting Song
05 - What Brings My Eyes Open
06 - Pearly Sleigh
07 - Mountain Song
08 - Hourglass


Media Report:
Genre: indie-folk
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits