Anika
Abyss
SACRED BONES
Midway through Berlin-Brit vocalist-composer Anika’s new album Abyss, during “Oxygen,” the singer icily intones the phrase “Cut into pieces, you become an image so rigid” over a bed of sound that moves from wirily and sparely threaded into a melody that’s lush, round, and ascending. The stop-motion, halt-stilted manner in which Anika sing-speaks these freedom-harshing lyrics reminds me of a young Nico talking next to her then-mentor Andy Warhol at the onset of The Velvet Underground, espousing something more theoretical than applied. Or she reminds me of Christiane Amanpour on a slow news day—one or the other.
The point I think I’m trying to make is that Anika, on her third full-length album, is rediscovering her roots as a journalist with lyrics that read like headlines penned by a poli-sci major, and as a singer who refuses to have her voice and words hidden below a klatch of heavy guitars. Abyss isn’t a rainbow, it’s more like a grey scale without delineated sections. Which isn’t to say she doesn’t enjoy a grouchy six-string or three, as we hear on “Walk Away” with its like-myself/don’t-like-myself narrative, or that the defined, thick-thumbed bass on “Hearsay” and its version of fake news isn’t welcome. “Out of the Shadows” is downright thrashy—it’s just that Anika’s most intentional lyrics and vocals are best heard within the context of this album’s wide production: the roomy ambience and breathing space that the finest moments of Abyss provide her.
Once viewed as aloof (there’s the Nico thing again), the hypnotic swell of her album’s title track and its swift, psychedelic-era edge allows her space for intimacy, to pull the listener in and warmly whisper sweet anti-authoritarian mash notes into their ear. The folky “Into the Fire” and the almost-pretty “Buttercups” are rich with life-journey stuff, and there’s even a spacious, silken song (“Walk Away”) that could be her lovelorn “Leaving on a Jet Plane” moment until she clearly enunciates the phrase “Life can just suck.” In whole, Abyss is edgily conscious, filled with many sonic mood swings, the best of which are open rather than cluttered.
