by David Wilikofsky
Anne Malin may be as well known as a poet as she is a musician, but the first thing that jumped out at me on her latest album, Summer Angel, wasn’t her words: it was her voice. The Nashville based artists’ vocals are a consistent focal point throughout Summer Angel, soaring to operatic heights as easily as they stay grounded with a steady vibrato. But even more than Anne Malin’s evident technical abilities, it’s the manner in which she shapes each and every word that animates the album; much as Karen Dalton did decades ago, Anne Malin seems to stretch the very fabric of time with her delivery. Recording each song in a single take, her voice flits between and around notes rather than hitting the expected beats. It’s an idiosyncratic style that feels designed to wring the emotional core out of each and every word.
Anne Malin’s band on Summer Angel includes many longtime members of the Nashville music scene; Undrcurrents’ readers may be most familiar with her drummer Trevor Nikrant (who plays in Styrofoam Winos and has released a stellar solo album under his own name), but her collaborators have worked with everyone from Standing On The Corner to Moor Mother. Most have a background in improvisation as well as more traditional song structures, skills that allow them to match the freedom of Anne Malin’s vocals. A searing sax solo in the middle of “Mary (Dear God Please Help Me)” matches the explosive intensity of Anne Malin’s delivery. The initially tranquil, country inflected “Soft Soft No” slowly builds in intensity to a droning climax. Textures ripple below the surface of closer “Burdens”, cathartically bursting forth in the album’s final minutes. All told, it’s a beautiful exploration of the intersection of language and sound, one that shows how the two can contort and twist each other into unexpected shapes when they’re perfectly in sync.