Anna Calvi
4/5
When speaking, Anna Calvi is whisper-quiet shy, but give her a spotlight, mic and a guitar, and the Londoner unleashes vocals that are commanding in every quaver. Brian Eno called her the biggest thing since Patti Smith, Nick Cave snapped her up to open for Grinderman’s European tour and Calvi is oft-mentioned in 2011’s many ‘ones to watch’ lists – including our own.
After a stint as the slide guitaring frontwoman for Cheap Hotel, who released one single in 2008 and faded from view, Calvi spent two years in the depths of her basement concocting a distillation of her most precious influences, meaning the earthy soul of Nina Simone and Maria Callas, the ethereal beauty of Ravel and Debussy and the out there freakiness of Captain Beefheart and Jimi Hendrix. The result is an album of stormy gems which is, by turns, achingly intimate (the gothic romance of ‘First We Kiss’), and powerful with a raw, obsessive bent (‘Suzanne and I’).
Bridging the gap between PJ Harvey – indeed Harvey cohort Rob Ellis is co-producer – and Jeff Buckley, Calvi is a skilled mistress of the slow build. She’s keen for the album to deliver as a complete composition and thus opens with a sparse instrumental of reverbed and delicate surf-ish guitar which segues into ‘No More Words’. It moves from slinky beginnings to finish with a siren-like choir before kicking into the red-blooded ‘Desire’.
Album closer ‘Love Won’t Be Leaving’ rounds things off with a climactic swirl of violins that fall away to leave the lone drum thudding like a heartbeat. There are a few scant moments when her vocal acrobatics and rippled guitars lose their way, but certainly Calvi’s debut is an album to get lost in.
