Anohni’s career has been powered by and fascinated with change. On 2005’s “For Today I Am a Boy,” from I Am a Bird Now, she plainly sang, “One day I’ll grow up, I’ll be a beautiful woman,” anticipating her blossoming evolution as a transgender woman. The artist’s stunning 2016 album Hopelessness was outfitted with chilly, sumptuous electronic soundscapes that pivoted away from the neo-classical palette of her previous work. And My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross, Anohni’s first full-length album in seven years, is another decisive permutation in her musical identity: a swerve into blues rock.
The 10 songs here feature some of Anohni’s most laidback and unfussy arrangements to date. The album’s sound is, like Lana Del Rey’s Ultraviolence, marked by minimalist, sometimes gloomy guitar strumming. My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross was produced by Jimmy Hogarth, a British session musician who’s worked with the likes of Amy Winehouse and James Blunt and who handles lead guitar throughout. Like Dan Auerbach did on Del Rey’s album, Hogarth’s playing drifts out into the ether on tracks like “Rest” and “Why Am I Alive Now?” in an expressive, dizzying manner. Other times, though, it’s so tame and inoffensive as to be inert, with his passive noodling barely registering on “It’s My Fault” and “There Wasn’t Enough.”
This lack of prominent instrumentation leaves plenty of room for Anohni’s vocals. “It Must Change,” which puts a fine point on her thematic preoccupations, and “Sliver of Ice” are particularly affecting showcases for the singer’s velvety vibrato. On “Scapegoat,” Anohni’s voice quakes to the point that it almost sounds like artificial reverb. But the musical accompaniment is too ordinary for Anohni’s one-of-a-kind voice. One longs for the more ambitious and frankly more theatrical stylings of albums like I Am a Bird Now and The Crying Light.
Anohni’s lyrical complexity enriches and elevates the overly refined instrumental choices on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross. She weaves a narrative about grief, self-disintegration, relationships dissolving, and environmental degradation that’s never solely about one of those things. She conflates an Earth drained of its resources with a dying lover on “There Wasn’t Enough” and, backed by Hogarth’s deceptively chipper guitar tones, addresses a deceased friend on “Can’t” while emphasizing her own fragility and mortality.
The album’s closing track, “You Be Free,” finds Anohni returning to a theme of sisterhood that she’s explored throughout her career. She considers how the Earth has taken the lives of her “mother” and “sisters” and frames her suffering in this life as a vessel for others to reach liberation in the afterlife. Anohni’s charting of various cycles of decay and change have the weight and import of a Greek tragedy. It’s a pity, then, that so much of the music on My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross underserves her anguished storytelling.
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