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Hopelessness, an uneasy feeling  transformed to an artistically attractive spectacle…or how I made up my mind about ANOHNI’s album

I have never felt so tormentingly undecided about an album before. Despite the fact that the powerful album’s title attempted to set my mood before I even had the chance to listen to it properly for the first time, this title was not the reason for my indecisiveness. After the album’s title, it was the cover with its distorted image of ANOHNI and the titles of the songs which, like the many heads of a hydra, attempted to monopolize my attention. Both the cover and the titles of the songs are in agreement with the album’s subjects and especially the titles of the songs are evidently darker than all the titles of songs that Antony Hegharty a.k.a ANOHNI had previously released. Finally it was the lyrics of the songs which tried to capture my undivided attention as they are filled with ideas and thoughts with most of which I could not agree more. The album’s essence was not hidden amongst these different aspects and this only became crystal clear after I had finished listening to this album for the fourth time. It was by then, that individual verses from the lyrics of some songs were imprinted on my mind and that my favourite song from the album ‘Obama’ had a very strong impact on my mood, not only because it feels like a mantra but because its overall atmosphere has elements that surpass its subject in so many ways! Somehow it had become obvious from the delivery of the lyrics, that ANOHNI’s voice was one more instrument and the aim was to articulate both the lyrics and the emotional awe that was provoked by the subjects of these lyrics. This album is so much more than a passionate performance of a few verses and the more I listened to it the more I realized that even though ANOHNI was actually singing, she was at the same time conveying a message at its purest possible form…Nevertheless, I still could not determine whether I actually liked the music. Indeed, the music in ‘Hopelessness’ is miles away from that of ‘I Am A Bird Now’ and ‘The Crying Light’ but the voice is still the same except this time, the stories she sings about, are much more sinister. If Antony’s voice in ‘You Are My Sister’, ‘Cripple And The Starfish’ and ‘Twilight’ had the qualities of a caress, we could confidently say that in ‘Hopelessness’ this voice and its mood incorporate the violence of a whip.

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