The last time Norway’s Annie released an album Ke$ha had the best-selling single of the year with ‘Tik Tok’. If Ke$ha released it now Donald would probably ban her. Another big seller in 2010 was Katy Perry/Snoop Dogg’s ‘California Gurls’ while Lady Gaga was having her ‘Bad Romance’.
That long ago? Yes. And Annie could have been as big as any of them. Her signature song, ‘Chewing Gum’ was very much in the same vein as Ke$ha at the very least. But ‘the Norwegian Kylie’ as she is known went off to East Berlin and settled into singing for other bands, DJ-ing and film-related work before returning in June with a new single, ‘American Cars’, which we reviewed positively.
That was a precursor to this new album, ‘Dark Hearts’, which is scheduled for release on 16th October.
‘Corridors of Time’ vaguely suggests something Stephen Hawking-like and indeed the song concerns being trapped in the middle of time at a point where you can look ahead and back. Not sure what Albert Einstein would have made of that but then he wasn’t a songwriter. It takes the example of a theatre dance floor, which is empty except for an older couple dancing together and a young girl dancing alone.
The album seemingly has a similar theme, seeking relief from the lives we’ve led and the ones we are living now, but always looking to the future.
As for this track, well ‘Chewing Gum’ it ain’t. It’s an opulent, full-bloodied love song packed to the gills with instrumentation and a huge, all-enveloping sound right up in the Spector class. A sort of pop version of one of Susanne Sundfør’s minor opuses.
Except that Ms Sundfør doesn’t sing lines like:
“Baby, I miss you more and more with every day
I’ll find a way back to when you were mine
And how we used to dance
Through the corridors of time
Baby (Where did you go? Where are you now?)”
And the way she delivers that ‘Baby’ will melt you. If it doesn’t you’ve no soul.
According to the PR, she conceived the album as “the soundtrack to a film that doesn’t exist,” taking its lead from films and TV series such as The Wicker Man, Twin Peaks, David Cronenberg’s Crash, and others, while it was was partly recorded in a country house reportedly haunted by a ‘sprinting nun’.
I’d sure as hell like to see that film. What a talent. Welcome back Annie.
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