Annie Gallup
Album: Weather
Label: Waterbug
Tracks: 12
Website: http://www.anniegallup.com

This album seems to've been out for well over a year now, but a copy has only just reached me. I'd been especially keen to hear it, since the work of this uncompromising Michigan-raised (but recently moved to California) singer-songwriter has since the late 90s both intrigued and captivated me with its brilliant literacy, its intense clarity of vision and expression, married to an often idiosyncratic approach to the thorny question of instrumental accompaniment.

Annie's previous albums have employed textures ranging from acoustic to electric, jazzy bass to electronic production, but Weather brings an exquisite new intimacy to her urgent poetry by dint of its focus, in terms of accompaniment, exclusively on the established (that is, in the field of classical music, albeit chamber music rather than lieder) ensemble of the string quartet.

The songs' arrangements here are by Asia Mei (a Russian-born, Israeli-raised Berkelee-educated composer living in Harlem, to whom Annie was introduced around five years ago by an erstwhile touring partner, bassist Sean Kelly), and they show musical insights matching the personal insights within the lyrics themselves, ingeniously both mirroring and commenting on the sung or recited texts. The writing for the medium itself is extremely competent and intelligent too, with expert understanding of timbre, bowing techniques and effects (although anyone half-expecting to hear echoes of stabbing Psycho ostinatos on the percipient Hitchcock's Thrillers will be sorely disappointed - but hey, Annie just wouldn't resort to anything so blatantly cheesy!).

The self-penned songs - twelve in all - together exhibit an impressive emotional range, readily formulating compelling pictures in sound that are enhanced by Annie's flawless, crystal-clear diction and sensual, sometimes quite sultry delivery. She has the facility to glide effortlessly and naturally from sung tone to spoken delivery, often during the course of the same song, as on the enigmatic Unmapped World. Her unerring sense of the power and quality of rhythm comes across most vividly on Sixty-Eight, whose counterpointing pizzicatos evoke a potent memory from that year with its "whole world is watching" chants and sense of impending snowstorm and fever, while the entirely-spoken Late is arguably the finest creation on the disc with its bustling, tumbling wordscape that rushes to get its thoughts out before everything's too… er, late - and boasts a disquieting backdrop that both reflects the piece's gravitational pull and the developments of its ongoing emotional landscape.

Elsewhere, as on Hound and Blacktop Boardwalk, Annie's knowing sense of phrasing puts me in mind of Peggy Seeger, at other times there are hints of Joni Mitchell in her more experimental phase. The sensuous nature of relationship reminiscences is most tellingly explored on Regrets and the sweet All Night Rain, while Ground Zero, Written In Chalk is a touching memory of a lost romance that transcends the resonances of the immediate locale.

All told, Weather is an extraordinarily insightful and outstanding artistic statement. It truthfully and maturely depicts a world where even the ostensibly simple things are in the end significantly and unavoidably complex and require thinking about; and yet, Annie's is not a depressing worldview, for she appears calm and composed in her accurate reflection of the personal in the context of the blindingly universal. This is a very special album.

David Kidman