Perfectly timed for an autumnal Halloween, the Swedish experimental composer’s sixth LP is devilishly haunting, complex, dark and beautiful, featuring a range of dynamic, glittering and drone sounds with woodwind, strings, her soaring voice, as well as guest appearances by Ethel Cain and Iggy Pop. Avant garde saxophonist Otis Sandsjö’s skill, range and presence considerably colours the album from instrumental opener The Beast and beyond, while Anna’s vocals break powerfully into the second, dramatic track Facing Atlas: “I came to take you back to where you came from …” This feels like an album that overtly addresses both personal and private as well as public and political, from ageing and depression to war’s death and destruction (“the sky is crashing down upon the ships of freedom … the life we had has vaporised into the sky”). There’s still her distinctive gothic flavour, but unlike last album, 2020’s All Thoughts Fly, instrumentals recorded on a replica of a 17th-century German baroque organ in a church in Gothenburg, there’s a far broader palette reaching to a shadowy pop somewhere between Kate Bush and Lana Del Rey. The title track, The Iconoclast is a tour de force of vivid, galloping intrigue and multiple passages and a soaring, powerful cri de coeur against a landscape of suffering: “Find the abundance in your life / Cut out the anger with a knife Look at it wildly, let it go / And accept the freedom in your soul / So many dreams and so many bodies, so many faces all around / Following something, following people, someone lonely gets left behind.” Then there’s the sparser, echoing build of The Whole Woman, with Iggy Pop’s 79-year-old now rather wobbbly, but affecting bass croon supporting a stirring song of defiance: “The story in the sand (for who I am) / Protected by your hand (for who I am) / Let dreams wash over thee / And unleash your seas on me.” The Mouth is breathy, witch-like, jittery vivid scarily slow but gorgeous, Stardust pacily races with tight drums, Aging Young Women (a duet with Ethel Cain in which their voices are perfectly match) is a smoky, if deathly beauty: “In the church when we cried / Some fallen angels told us to keep our heads high But one said / You will burn on the stake In the crumbled chest of kindness / Your heart will break.” There’s much more to come with Sandsjö’s sax quite extraordinary on the quieter Consensual Neglect and the more explosive Struggle With The Beast, before the evocative, intimate ambience of An Ocean Of Time (featuring Abul Mogard), church organ and ripples of strings and synths on Unconditional Love, before the slow forming closer Rising Legends. An epic, 72-minute journey of evolving shades and moods in a masterpiece of vivid, affecting composition and performance, a surely an album of the year contender. Out on YEAR0001.
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