A lot of times by this time of the year my brain is more or less mush. The last several weeks of the semester are a mad rush of classes, papers, exams and long nights hard at work. Most of the time releases will slip under my radar and sometimes I might not catch up to them until mid-Summer. Thankfully I’m not too too late on this release, which might have been the best new album ever released on Record Store Day, a marvelous and moody piece of work by a duo calling themselves Annabel (Lee). From the name, to the title of the record and songs, to the imagery on the cover, there’s a clear inspiration gained from the work of Edgar Allen Poe. The music reminds my ears of the glory days of trip hop, and while I don’t have nearly enough information on the artists behind this music (Annabel & Richard E), I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if they had lent their talents to some of the UK bands of that period of time.
As you can tell from “(1849),” Annabel’s vocals don’t quite sound of this world, and the production work behind her, sparse, dark and at times downright ghostly, keeps the sound floating into the kind of space you’d think a dream-time collaboration between Billie Holiday and Geoff Barrow, both at their most melancholy, would produce. As best I can tell both artists now call Los Angeles home and so if all goes well we’ll all get to know much more about this music in the summer when I have the time to track them down and bring them into the KPFK studios. Until then, we have this music, some of the best I’ve heard all year, to tide us over.
