“Wheelpusher“
from the EP Afton
2008
There’s a lot to say about Anni Rossi. She’s been working with Steve Albini on her debut album proper, slated for release on 4AD in 2009. She’s recorded a version of Radiohead‘s “Creep” that turns the self-loathing of the original inside out and upside down. She’s loved by other artists like Electrelane and The Ting Tings, with whom she’s toured Europe and the States. And she’s apparently popular not just with artsy boho types, but with American heartland blue-collar construction workers, who think she’s a cross between PJ Harvey and Paula Abdul.
And yet it’s hard to know how to describe her. “Avant-folkie” sort of comes close, as does “neo-classical singer-songwriter with quirky voice.” Luckily, the 22-year-old from Minnesota via Los Angeles has her own neat tag for who she is and what she does: “I’m a classical kid, turned viola-pop wunderkind,” she says. So there you have it. For further idea of what to expect from her 4AD debut EP, Afton, imagine if Björk had been captured after leaving the Sugarcubes and locked in a darkened room with the viola player from the Brodksy Quartet. Rossi is that viola player.
Classically trained from a young age, she started out as a violinist before opting for its “lower register and larger-framed cousin.” Now she plucks the poor thing with manic glee while whooping and shrieking like a hyped-up pixie. This is music for singing round the old Joanna — or maybe that should be Joanna Newsom? Rossi is like Newsom’s kid sister. Or perhaps Devendra Banhart‘s brattish, precocious younger cousin. You’ll either find her winningly girly and intoxicating, or irritating in her smug idiosyncratic strangeness.
On “Machine,” the opening track on Afton, she eeks and grrs to denote joy unbound while the lyrics express a general wonderment at ice, snow, the natural world, and if that doesn’t merit the epithet “Björkesque,” we don’t know what does. Most of Rossi’s songs are sparse and spare, the spaces in the music filled by her panoply of vocal tics and imagistic imaginings. On “Arctic Swing,” for example, she longs to be a beekeeper’s daughter in the Himalayas. Where “Machine” finds her “swinging crazily like a stock exchange,” “Ecology” is the closest she comes to a pop song, albeit an eccentric little one (it’s 1:46 short, with guitar, woodwind, percussion and a driving beat). It sees her marvelling at caterpillars, her discovery that they’re “concentric” eliciting a series of raar!s, hah!s and shriek!s. On “Venice,” she alternates between long drawn-out moans and sharp ecstatic sighs before countering the classical viola runs that close the piece with a bizarre impression of a motorboat. Like we say, you’re either going to love her or be filled with homicidal fury at her every gasp, wail and chirrup.