Review Summary: Her love is lost, it rots, her life decays, her soul descends.
Out of the mouth of a cave, far away on some godforsaken desolate hillside, emerges a wild-haired, red-eyed banshee. The rain tumbles down dull and dreary. The wind blows and the wind roars. In the gloaming, that short shelf that sits between the setting of the sun and the depth of darkness, when loping lovers steal trysts in hushed recesses, she remembers her own lover. He who is no more. And Anna Calvi throws back her head, looks up to the moon and howls.
Her love is lost, it rots, her life decays, her soul descends. She stirs her cauldron, mixes in snot and tears. “
Tell your heart: go find another, but the darkness comes, and oh another endless night” she chants. That guitar, once a dizzy adjunct in some out of time spaghetti western film track, is now a chainsaw, bludgeoning and battering. She screams in rage to the grunge punk of
Love of My Life, screams in despair to the gothic pop of
Cry, screams at the dying light with eternal blackness.
She shivers, retreats to the warmth of the fire. In the flickering flames she recalls the face of her lover … almost smiles. She combs her long lank hair, wretched and ragged, croons to herself the sublime chorus of
Carry Me Over. In
Piece By Piece she seduces with her breathy whispers, octave-climbing. But only a moment, never more than a moment. Like a magpie dazzled by stolen glitter, she never lingers on these pretty choruses, but meanders back mesmerized to her nest of staccato verses, meanders back to her misery.
There is nothing left here but to escape. She mounts her broomstick, makes for the moon made incarnadine with the blood of her own wounds in
Bleed To Me. She drowses in cascades of violins, soothes herself in classical interludes, casts impotent invocations with the choral apotheosis of
The Bridge. She plucks out the stars in the sky. There is nothing left.
