Review Summary: Stop haunting me, please...
in|FLUX might take the prize for the most aptly titled album this year. The recurring themes throughout, running through its lyrics, its instrumentation and structure are those of flow and vulnerability, uncovering and expression. The organic qualities of the songs, often intimate to the point of uncomfortability, the gently tapped out polyrhythms and odd signatures from bodhrans and skin drums, the turns into late-night downtempo, along with the swelling backing vocals emerging from the blackness, may reminisce somewhat of
Fetch the Bolt Cutters-era Fiona Apple here and there, but there’s more than enough of Savage’s unique artistic sensibilities to ward off any sense that there’s anything derivative about in|FLUX. While in|FLUX's singer-songwriter soul doesn't nearly limit itself to a folk-music covering, Anna B Savage draws from art pop songs using folk instruments, uncomfortably intimate in subject matter and alluringly unstable in execution.
But whether in|Flux is engaging in haunted, odd-signatured folk reminisces or nocturnal downtempo beats, the prevailing mood is the intimacy of a self-portrait, the mirrored image of Savage standing against the empty background. The album plays like a chamber pop concert performed inside the psyche of Savage herself. Her velvety, breathy contralto, androgynous in its depth and alluring in its open expressions of desire and anguish, often in the same song, is naturally the primary tool in her kit, but, in an almost spontaneous, exploratory fashion, she selects and employs sounds from a startling array of sources. Much of the music on the album draws heavily from found-instrument vibes, all arrayed in her chamber-pop sensibilities, hand drums, clarinet and saxophone over pulsing loops and murmuring piano chords that if they were merely the sum of their parts might add up to any other chamber pop album, but which create a startling range of moods when paired with Anna’s unique voice and aesthetic, an aesthetic that is the root of this ever-shifting openness to sound.
Time is very much out of joint for Anna, what can be at one moment an expression of desire can very quickly turn into something poignant or unsettled in its baring of old wounds. With subjects ranking from open desire on Pavlov’s Dog and Touch Me, to the ever-shifting, never-nailed-down nature of history and personality, Anna B is undertaking as much of an introspective self-archeology as she ever has. And while taking the soul-baring confessional track has been
de rigeuer for this kind of thing for a very long time, Savage’s knack for uncovering some of the darker aspects of longing and inner contradiction, along with the utter frankness of her language make her voice a unique one in the sea of intimate pop self-portraits floating in the ether. If her expressions of desire are open to the point of being slightly off-putting, it helps that they are as multi-faceted as any of her other self expressions on the album. Desire for Savage is messy and hard to pin down, as related to turmoil and pain as to ecstasy. In short, its a complex, very human take on this fundamental element of human experience.
The moment in which in|FLUX dives headfirst off the rails, where she takes a sudden, whiplash inducing turn into self-parody, and maybe the most conceptually important moment on the thing, appears midway through the title track as Anna breathes out, totally straightfaced, “we had sex, I didn’t cum” before setting her keyboard to the “tuba” setting for an eye-popping dance breakdown closed out by producer Mike Lindsay belting out a “OH YEAH” in the background as Anna laughs. Is it good? Silly question, really. It’s awkward, and messy and disruptive of the whole flow of the thing, but it’s also a release of the central conceit of the album, a moment that flies in the face of the whole composed confession and reveals another facet of Anna’s personality, a persona outside of that of the whispering catharsis artist that she is on much of the rest of the album. And while it’s not a song I’d ever return to outside the context of the album, it, in its very disjointedness, cements the central idea of in|FLUX: that of the fluidity, the permeability and endless flow of the human personality.
It certainly can’t be argued that Anna B Savage isn’t an artist in the true sense of the word, that her music isn’t an expression deeply entangled with her sense of self. There’s very little in the way of posturing or put-on persona; Anna seems more interested in organizing the messiness of her own experiences and shifts in personality and desire into something bordering on coherent, while fleeing from any attempt to fit her personality into a neat conceptual box. Even the idea of this project runs the risk of either being inadvertently forced into that box, or becoming an incoherent, ever-shifting mess. And even if Anna occasionally wobbles on either side of this tightrope, it’s all done in a way that nonetheless stays true to Anna herself. And for an artist, it’s very hard to ask for more than that.
