8. Anohni and the JohnsonsThe Crying Light
This album is so overlooked! I think ‘Kiss My Name’ has inspired me lyrically more than almost any other song in the last ten years. It’s just so powerful and happy, but not cheaply happy. "I am trying to be sane, I’m trying to kiss my friends" – what a great lyric!
I am unmoved by the Anohni record, so it’s important for me to dig back into this record a lot. I don’t know why, but the new album doesn’t touch me… at all. I just don’t get it – I don’t like the music and I don’t understand why she would be compelled to be didactic in that way. She’s been so political for her entire career. And in particular after reading her interview with The Creative Independent, which is fucking amazing, by the way, a must-read. But in particular the things she says in there about the relationship between music and commerce, pop and commerce. And I was thinking, "What the fuck? Why did you make this record?" It just seemed so reactionary. And The Crying Light in particular felt like the most musical record, and lyrically it goes from the most extreme poetry that she’s ever written, in the ‘Epilepsy Is Dancing’-kind of writing or ‘Her Eyes Are Underneath The Ground’. ‘Kiss My Name’ is so direct, it’s so sick – I always come back to that.
