Anna Calvi
Is This All There Is?
DOMINO
Listeners still reeling from Anna Calvi’s noisy and explicitly confessional last album, 2018’s Hunter, may have hoped that eight years on they’d get more than just a four-song EP from the British songwriter. Everything Calvi has recorded since 2011’s eponymously titled debut has been more dramatic and operatic, yet primally mercurial—think PJ Harvey meets Maria Callas—than the last. How could you not want more than four songs, even if she’s promised that this release initiates a trilogy of projects exploring “identity as a metamorphosis, shaped and reshaped through the experience of falling in love”?
The evocative shades of Peggy Lee’s sad-cabaret balladry immediately come to mind with the title of Calvi’s new EP, Is This All There Is?. To then present this quartet of songs with lustrous, theatrical arrangements and a cranky, actorish guest list only increases the tension. That these tracks are fantastically, uniquely cinematic and anomalously apart from her usual—yet still familiar-sounding to her canon—is quite the feat. Starting with her Iggy Pop duet, elder punk’s weary, walking id (perfectly cast here) joins forces with a trilling Calvi for a conversation on the art of self-destruction set to the throb of what sounds like a broken metronomic drum machine and Anna’s own wall of distorted guitars. Extra points for Calvi’s wild banshee howl behind Pop singing the line “I want to do more than survive” that manages to out-beast Iggy in the wooly mammoth muskiness race.
It may take a moment for listeners to realize that Laurie Anderson’s usual dip-diving sing-speak is tackling Kraftwerk’s “Computer Love,” with Calvi behind her providing an angelic and mesmerically wordless choir atop a background of lo-fi programmed scrawl and a rhythm worthy of Trans Europe Express. In another cover-tune moment, Calvi and a quavering Perfume Genius join forces for Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s slow, sad “I See a Darkness,” trading voices and finishing each other’s sentences in some weird Sappho-sensual whisper as Calvi adds insistently doomy guitars throughout the timpani-drummed proceedings.
“God, I want to go home / But I want to stay out there”—who hasn’t felt this lonely, fever-frenzied sentiment? Yet through the shadowy, orchestral arrangement of “Is This All There Is?,” Calvi and The National’s Matt Berninger make that forlorn feeling new, nuanced, and rhythmically galloping with the guitarist adding a riff reminiscent of Robert Fripp’s overwhelming, stately soar from “Heroes”—until its near-finale, a fake ending marked by a high, wide holler from Calvi. How she packed so much vividly rendered sound and vision into one 15-minute record broken into four pieces is her secret, one we’re pretty certain won’t reveal its mystery even if she recorded a dozen more EPs.
