★★★★☆
It hardly sounds like a barrel of laughs. The former Antony Hegarty, angel-voiced singer of Antony and the Johnsons, and now identifying as the transgender Anohni, has made an album about drone bombs, the apocalyptic and irreversible effects of global warming, Barack Obama’s failure to achieve positive change, and America’s brutal approach to the death penalty. Self-congratulatory moralising at its finger-pointing zenith, it’s The Guardian’s “Comment is free . . .” to a disco beat.
“All those rhinos and all those big mammals, I want to see them lying and crying in the field,” Anohni wails on 4 Degrees against a vast orchestral backing. “Blow me from mountains and into the sea,” she pleads on Drone Bomb Me, while on the upbeat Execution she suggests that it’s best not to look too hard into evidence of guilt when wishing to send someone off to the electric chair. “Don’t let them dig up my grave,” she reasons. “Sometimes the feeling is reason enough.”
Then there’s Obama. “You are spying, executing without trial,” she intones, in a voice like a wrathful god. That’s just what POTUS needs after eight years of battling Congress: a self-righteous pop star offering plenty of criticism and no solutions.
Spend a bit of time with Hopelesness, however, and it becomes more interesting than its initial impression as the album equivalent of a sixth-former poking you in the ribs and saying, “Just think about it, yeah?” suggests. First, the musical setting is remarkable. Featuring production from the electronic artists Oneohtrix Point Never and Hudson Mohawke, it’s lush one moment and grandiose the next, with everything from fizzing distortion to sweeping strings going against Anohni’s reedy, Nina Simone-like voice. And, more significantly, the singer is not only taking on issues that pop music has remained oddly immune to, but is also accepting her own part in the subjects she is protesting about in such a bald way.
As Anohni sings, “I want to burn the animals,” in 4 Degrees, it’s worth remembering that this is coming from a globetrotting pop star whose carbon footprint is far higher than that of the average person. “I’ve been taking more than I deserve,” she sings on the starkly beautiful, gospel-tinged Hopelessness, while Crisis addresses the singer’s complicity, as an American taxpayer, in US drone strikes. The unsubtle, initially off-putting take on every significant issue dominating global geopolitics is part of a bold artistic statement in which Anohni, unlike so many tub-thumping, charity wristband-wearing stadium rockers, does not elevate herself above the issues she raises. (Rough Trade)