Anna Calvi - Hunter
Anna Calvi's powerful and intense debut album was deservedly rewarded with a Mercury Music Prize nomination on its release in 2011. The stylish and personal One Breath, with its confrontations of fear and vulnerability, achieved the same in 2014. Now, four years later, Calvi's third offering arrives as an erotically charged statement of confidence, displaying a hunger to challenge the traditional spectra of gender, sexuality and desire.
"If I was a man, and opened up my body..." she muses on the opening before her trademark soaring vocals reach a climactic finale. "I dress myself in leather, put flowers in my hair" she teases during Hunter, and then Don't Beat The Girl Out Of My Boy pleads for even more fluidity.
As always, her guitar work is enigmatic, almost virtuosic, and never more so than in the screeching solo that intersects the conundrum of Indies Or Paradise. Swimming Pool arrives as a hot, sultry cinematic beauty of a track that recalls Charlotte Rampling and Ludivine Sagnier's performances in François Ozon's 2003 film of the same name.
This is an album that rejects grey for at least fifty shades of red, black and gold, and will almost certainly become my album of 2018.
