You know when someone comes up to and starts telling you about this fantastic film they’ve just seen, or this fantastic book they’ve just read and continues to rattle on about it for five-minutes without pausing for breath only to conclude their eulogy by thrusting it in your hands and telling you that you can borrow it? And you don’t have the heart to take the wind out of their sails by saying that you got it yourself 12months ago? Well the Keren Ann’s self-titled ‘Keren Ann’ album is a little bit like that. The first bit anyway. As scrummy and compelling as tracks like ‘It’s All A Lie’ and ‘Lay Your Head Down’ are, you can’t help but think that Hope Sandoval and Mazzy Star had all this lightly orchestrated, Morricone world of heavy-boots, dirty guitars and rumbling dark intensity pretty much sussed as far back as the early nineties. And whilst that is true, you are reluctant to take offence to it simply because of the sheer panache with which this sometime Israeli, sometime French downtempo-uptown girl has ‘reheated’ it all. And whilst not half as smoky, coquettish, spectral or cinematic as the utterly delightful ‘Nolita’ album, that introspective lounge menagerie is clearly still not wanting of club members.
The tinkling of a piano at unimaginably high-octaves, the extraneous pish of percussion, the spaced-out whir of an organ and other assorted sound-effects, some pizzicato strings and a melange of flutes, ‘The Harder Ships Of The World’ and ‘Liberty’ come sailing out of the ether like anniversary roses cast on a sea of milk and honey (or something equally romantic on the Humber Estuary).
Conceived by Keren Ann, performed by Keren Ann, recorded by Keren Ann and mixed by Queen of The Stone Age and Tool’s Joe Barresci – this is Keren Ann.