(2022) Anne Garner - Dear Unknown              


Review:
Imagine the most perfect Anne Garner album and chances are it would sound pretty much like Dear Unknown. It’s as if she and producer James Murray consciously identified every single thing that makes her music phenomenal and distilled it with immense care and deliberation into a single statement — it’s that good. Though it was assembled over a three-year period, the material never sounds laboured; instead, the impression created is of music that’s arrived fully formed, conceptualized with clarity and realized with acute sensitivity to detail. As this suite-like project unfolds, it becomes apparent that its contents are less songs than incantations and intoxicants. Themes of recovery, healing, and resilience permeate the album, but to liken them to pandemic-related re-emergence would be an oversimplification (even if it’s tempting to read lyrics such as “No more jumbled mind / Now in clear horizons” from “This is Freedom” as consistent with that interpretation). Garner’s exploring something more spiritual and fundamental in referencing such themes, and to explain the album concept by relating to it to our recent collective experience would be to regard the project too literally and reductively. Further to that, text accompanying the release describes it as a collection that journeys “through the artist’s personal history of moral constriction and religious abuse to arrive at a place of extraordinary lightness and release.” The notion of recovery emerges early when in the opening title track she sings “Demons have flown / Taken my sorrow” and when the delicate music soothes with its peaceful aura. As this song and the others that follow show, Garner’s voice has lost none of its bewitching quality, an effect intensified by its prominence in the mix. Every nuance of her delivery and inflection is audible (hear, for instance, her arresting pronunciation of “love” in “Besides”), and it’s made even more spellbinding when syllables stretch out and tension is maximized. The seven productions after “Dear Unknown” prove as mesmerizing, from the ethereal hush of “This Is Freedom” to the organ-driven slow-burn of the hymnal “All Wounds” with its stirringly triumphant tone. The trainspotter’s desire to know every detail about a production is stymied by credits that simply identify Garner as writer and Murray producer. But being deprived of such info is arguably for the better, as it allows the material to retain its magic and mystery. Knowing that so-and-so played bass or some such thing would ground the project too much in the real world as opposed to the vaporous, incandescent one from which it seems to have originated. Speaking of which, the soundworlds the two have fashioned complement the songwriting brilliantly. Electronics, flutes, keyboards, and programmed beats are assembled into dense, dream-like grounds that maximize the splendour of her voice. Slow tempos likewise amplify its beauty and allow the listener the luxury of time to bask in it. Consider, for example, the sublime vocal she delivers in “Dust Devil,” its quietly rapturous impact intensified by the slow-motion enunciation of the vocal melodies and the way the elongation of the syllables in “whirlwind” moves from tension to release. Glorious moments such as these are plentiful on the release. During “Surrender,” she gently repeats the title, the song’s sole lyric, like a mantra, the word less an invitation to give up than surrender to the beauty of the celestial music. Dear Unknown climaxes with the song “Alma,” titled after Garner’s late mother and a heartfelt celebration of her spirit. The song brings this album to a stirring close when lyrics such as “In the darkness / I still see your smile / Words of wisdom / Echo round my mind” memorialize her so lovingly. That music of such consummate poise and grace is oriented around hope makes the album all the greater an accomplishment.





Track List:
1.Dear Unknown 05:32
2.This Is Freedom 03:59
3.Dust Devil 05:02
4.All Wounds 05:48
5.Besides 05:12
6.Golden Arrow 06:15
7.Surrender 05:02
8.Alma 04:26


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, dream-pop
Country: UK
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits


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