IndieWorkshop.com
reviewed by Terry Sawyer    8/20/03

There’s a long history of artists who pointedly refuse to settle down and make babies with one particular style. It’s not usually the easiest route to take. Many times, artists who produce buffet albums perform acts of wide-ranging dilution. Then there are people like Beck who compose from their current play list and still manage to create something beyond hastily clipped facades. Yet, even geniuses in this mode, like Dionne Warwick and Dusty Springfield, made abrasive missteps that simply insulted their influences in service to the shackles of Top Forty. Anny Celsi is somewhere between those two paths, creating an album with nods to radio acquaintanceship and lots of indie-country pop heavy petting.

When her genre skimming peaks, it’s sharp and rewarding. “Summer Fling” ,equal parts Motown and Bachrach, is breezy, bouncy and flitting with Audrey Hepburn abandon. “Wicked Little Heart” is swift and sexy, a track that could easily appear on a Julee Cruise record. Who could deny a song that’s all spiked heels and a chorus with the line “You’re going to learn to love these chains”? “All I’m Gonna Say” works perfectly: a dark alley pub song, girded by fiercely pounded out piano riffs that has the overall Tom Waits-lite vibe so cunningly mined by Eleni Mandell. When Celsi let’s a few burs into her voice, she sounds more present than she does on other tracks. Though her voice is undeniably pretty, it’s almost too dainty and muted. During a few of the album’s low points, she suffers from mid-range strain of your average commuter trying to keep up with their favorite AM classic.

The album’s greatest strength is in its lyrics. Celsi has a top-notch novelist’s sense of detail. The pulp fiction glosses that she wrote to accompany every album track are truly remarkable by themselves. How many people do you know that could rhythmically accommodate “Capistrano swallow” in a song with any amount of grace? As the album sketches out gone wrong women and situations, her lyrical knack for snagging human nature is astounding in lines like “’Twas Her Hunger Brought Me Down’s” “if it’s beauty that compels you, then it’s hunger brings you down”.

Who are critics to give advice? Presumably any artist worth their salt makes the choices they do because that’s how they are compelled to create. But it wouldn’t hurt to find a sound among the influx of influences and just dig in, tear it open, and make an album that doesn’t try to jump trains on every track. When Little Black Dress disappoints it does so by creating tepid mixed-genre porridge like the spaghetti western Shania Twain throwback of “No Time Like Now”. At one point during the song, I pictured a floor full of third graders with auto harps. That’s not a good thing. But however you cut it, Celsi is gifted. In the final abacus total though, Little Black Dress ends up a victim of its ambition and appetites.
 

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