Annie Hogan is something of a quiet icon of goth and post-punk. A longtime friend of Marc Almond, she put on early Soft Cell shows and played with his dark cabaret side-project Marc and the Mambas. She appears on Barry Adamson’s seminal Moss Side Story and has worked with Lydia Lunch, Nick Cave, and several members of Einstürzende Neubauten. She’s also been releasing evocative solo music since the late 1980s, the latest of which, the six track album Tongues In My Head, strikes an elegant balance of light and shade.
Opening track ‘Alles Ist Verloren’ is measured but bleak, a taxonomy of a post-apocalyptic landscape peopled with faith healers, wilting trees and “shaking bones of the dead”. The bones of the track are also bare – a simple chord progression on piano, and an electronic beat that carries every track – joined by layered keyboard sounds. ‘Scorpions’ and ‘Safe Hands’ are even slower, both half-dirges, half-prayers with thoughtful instrumental interjections, keys, organs, xylophones and other percussion all played by Hogan herself.
Hogan’s adaptable voice shifts with her surroundings. On ‘Scorpions’ it is multi-tracked and deep as the grave. It wobbles and glides from note to note on ‘Deadly Night Shade’, mimicking the sinister sound of a detuned glockenspiel. On ‘Safe Hands’, Hogan’s main vocal is processed to sound weather-beaten and wrecked, a sharp contrast to the celestial chorus of backing vocals. Across the full album, Hogan sustains a convincing tension between the divine and the dirtied; the kind of patinated soulfulness that defined Mark Lanegan’s Bubblegum or PJ Harvey’s Is This Desire?
One of Hogan’s named influences for the album is Leonard Cohen, whose presence is most felt amongst the waltzing keyboard countermelodies of ‘Death Rituals’. Like Cohen, Hogan greets death as a friend not to be feared, albeit a mysterious one – a “light in the dark at the end of the night”. As the instrumentation drops out, the slow beat of a drum emerges, as though signalling the beginning of the end. The theme of rituals runs through much of the album, culminating with ‘The Conjurer’, where sensuality is presented as a potent form of magic. Tongues In My Head is an intense listen, but a beguiling experience – where the veils that separate desire, death and longing are worn thin.
