
ANOHNI AND THE JOHNSONS
My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross (Rough Trade)
Trying to pin down exactly how this album fits into Anohni’s body of work to date is tricky. It’s her first album accompanied by The Johnsons since 2010, though the band are mostly new and UK-based; musically, there’s a retreat from the digitalisms of Anohni’s mid-2010s solo releases in favour of a sound that’s both lush and spartan, echoing 70s soul with a folky undercurrent and a little of the torch-song vulnerability that marked earlier Johnsons albums.
Instrumentally, My Back Was A Bridge… is a delight, soft-focus arrangements sometimes bolstered by brass and strings – think someone like Terry Callier – and Anohni’s voice, possessing a sort of powerful frailty, rides above strikingly. Lyrically, these songs are defiant, often protesting, though couched in language more open to interpretation than 2016’s intense Drone Bomb Me single. Perhaps Anohni is best regarded as an artist in a perpetual state of reinvention.
words NOEL GARDNER