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(Rough Trade)The New York singer’s voice will make you shiver as it soars over simple guitar, bass and drums on her most approachable album since the mid-00sYou would be hard-pushed to call Anohni’s sixth studio album – her first since Hopelessness seven years ago – anything other than an unexpected departure. Whatever path you imagined her admirably peripatetic career might take next, it’s unlikely you pictured it involving a collaboration with Jimmy Hogarth, producer and songwriter for the likes of James Blunt. Anohni’s recent releases had shifted her ever further into the musical left field – or rather, back towards the left field from where she sprang, Anohni being, in the words of her friend Rufus Wainwright, “a real underground downtown institution” in New York clubland long before the Mercury-winning success of 2005’s I Am a Bird Now (recorded as Antony and the Johnsons) led another friend, Boy George, to suggest she could “outstrip Norah Jones and sell millions of records”. The feeling that the left field might have appealed more than the mainstream was hard to escape when listening to her 2020 cover of Bob Dylan’s It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue, her voice deliberately distorted in a way that made you wince. Or indeed the same year’s RNC 2020, a melange of screams and feedback that even its creator described as “pretty rough”.But, three years on, here is Anohni’s album-length collaboration with the writer of James Bay’s gold-selling 2015 single If You Ever Want to Be in Love and Duffy’s Warwick Avenue. You can speculate as to the reasons – a disinclination to be pigeonholed? A desire for her serious lyricism about the climate crisis, gender and capitalism to reach as wide an audience as possible? Whatever the reason, My Back Was a Bridge for You to Cross may be the most approachable album Anohni has made since the mid-00s. Continue reading...