It’s easy to bandy about the term ‘goth’ for certain aesthetics, but Anchoress have the literary references to hold the title. The Berlin-based band (not to be confused with Catherine Ann Davies’ project The Anchoress) channel a less production-heavy approach to 80s goth rock, along with medieval reference points. Their debut full-length, with the tongue in cheek title Cockdust, eschews double entendres for languid arrangements and brooding imagery.
Singer Anna Lucia Nissen’s deep, warbling alto is commanding even as it’s controlled. It’s also at the centre of almost everything on the album, giving sprawling songs a path to follow. It’s only in the final moments of album closer ‘Toys of Grace’, when she unleashes an extended, piercing note, that it becomes clear she’s been holding back.
This reserved approach typifies Anchoress’s songs. It’s easy to image these songs with bombastic arrangements and over the top production. Songs frequently feel like they’re on the verge of combusting, but Anchoress keep a tight lid on them, allowing tensions to fade out. Opening track ‘Brave Men’ slowly builds this feeling that the song will tip into metal territory, that the buzzing guitars will become more aggressive, but they keep the song on the side of melodic and only allow a bit of melodrama in Nissen’s confrontational delivery of the chorus: “You are the one / You are the way”.
The album title, Cockdust, is never fully clarified in the lyrics, but there’s not really a situation in which it’s flattering. It’s a mild provocation – their songs are not nearly as abrasive as the title suggests. Yet there is some abstraction of themes that critique a masculine order that serves neither men nor women: men in battle for some vague greater purpose, women scorned for dubious reasons, religion through a medieval lens that’s blurred by witchcraft. ‘Hairy Mary’ in particular ties the gothic with the religious, the woman cast out who then meets an unfortunate end with others left to compensate for a society’s wrongs.
But Anchoress’s use of the distant past as a mirror isn’t uniformly grim. It’s ‘Song of the City of Women’ – inspired by a work of fifteenth-century literature that argues the strengths and virtues of women – that breathes a different energy into the album. Minutes of guitar feedback give way to keyboards and drums thudding in a trudging rhythm. Rather than the tension dissipating as it does elsewhere on the album, the tempo suddenly becomes bouncy. And Nissen’s wordless vocals are in turn just as carefree. So much of the album is a reflection of the mistakes we repeat throughout history, but maybe there is some positive inspiration to take.
