Annie Lennox has a new album out: Songs of Mass Destruction.
If nothing else (and there's a lot else), Annie Lennox has great great pipes. But what is just progressively clear with each solo outing is that she writes interesting music to take advantage of that instrument. Interesting POP music. Her work makes pop innovative and interesting sonically.
I'm just having a first pass through this new album, cover work perhaps unabashedly reaching back to Diva (or further), and the vocal layerings are so rich and so captivating.
On the last album, bare (which certainly described the cover self-portrait), there were a few tracks that occasionally seemed cloying in an otherwise superlative set, like A thousand beautiful things or Track 11. Here, there's nothing on first glance that makes me think ok, no need to put that one on the iPod.
Beyond the vocals, Lennox has an acute sense of melody. Dark Road and Fingernail Moon are rich, melodic intriguing sketches, resonant of much earlier pop like cole porter. There are reminiscences here: the vocal layering in Womankind at one point reminds me of experiments from the Eurythmics' 1984 soundtrack. Colored Bedspread echoes "Jennifer" from Sweet Dreams (are Made of This) crossed with Andrew Bell like synth lines of Erasure. Sing featuring Madonna and Aretha Franklin among others has a surging piano bass drive echoing "i heard it on the grape vine"
Beyond the reminiscences, there are newer traces: Love is Blind is an edgy, passionate, blues inspired ironic observation/accusation "oh sugar, when you gonna come?" The lyric moves though from a visceral seeming lust cry to an expression of frustration at hurt and pain on a personal and global (reaching to the album title) level captured in the repeating end line "tired of being so screwed up" - this is not just a complaint about one's emotional reality. The theme is continued more explicitly in "Lost" - being repulsed by cruelty in evidence in a war torn world, but seeing that darkness stemming not from outer but equally inner causes "we're lost." That said, the first piece i'm playing on repeat is Fingernail Moon. It's one of those sweetly intense tunes that is just piercing, in that bernini/st. theresa-esque way.
The rest of the material is immediately recognizable as Annie Lennox. The lyrics' expression of joy lined with regret has been a recurrent trail through Lennox's solo work. What surprises me, is that if anything, Lennox's compositions are better, richer, deeper than previously. Maybe it's just that we don't have much experience of a successful female singer/songwriter composing and recording into her second half century - so we don't have the experience of many pop women writers/artists just getting better with age. The set i think of is Joni Mitchell (64), Annie Lennox (53), Kate Bush (49). I'm looking forward to more more more!
If there's one disappointment it's that the album feels so short. At 46.9 minutes it's more reminiscent of a vinyl LP length than a CD. And that 3/4's of an hour passes way, way to quickly.
Highly highly recommended.