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No one would call Anna Calvi’s music tame. This is an artist who announced herself in 2011 with the rousing drama of “Desire” and the sweeping, Morricone-inspired vistas of “Love Won’t Be Leaving,” who took the stage in flaming red silk, expressive riffs sparking from her sunburst Telecaster. It was enough to make Brian Eno enthusiastically declare her “the biggest thing since Patti Smith” and earn the Twickenham native a Mercury Prize nomination her first time out. Calvi’s excellent second album, One Breath, which earned her second nod for the U.K.’s biggest music prize, pushed her sound to more playful, experimental territory, even if John Congleton’s (St. Vincent) outsize noise-pop production occasionally felt more imposed upon than supportive of Calvi’s compositions.
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On her third album, Calvi unleashes a rawer, more ferocious voice, one sharpened by her hunt for agency and freedom as a queer woman. Nexus mod manager install error codes. Calvi’s work has always subtly defied gender conventions (see: songs like “Suzanne & I” and “I’ll Be Your Man,” her general stage presence), but with the announcement of Hunter, the musician published what was essentially a manifesto stating, fist raised, that this was a queer, feminist record: “I believe that if we were allowed to be somewhere in the middle, not pushed to the extremes of performed masculinity and femininity, we would all be more free… I want to explore a more subversive sexuality, which goes further than what is expected of a woman in our patriarchal heteronormative society.” Driven by this passion, Hunter is a wrecking-ball demolition of boundaries.
Hunter lays claim to a range of roles and emotions typically off-limits for women, particularly aggression and sexual agency, while reclaiming the one usually assigned them: vulnerability. Naturally, these truths often coexist within the same song: In the psychobilly pulse of “Wish,” Calvi is possessed by a Nick Cave-like mania, chasing down just “one more wish before I die,” when the sight of her lover’s eyes stops her dead in her tracks, a resplendent chorus of guitar, synth, and operatic wails momentarily arresting and soothing her. It’s one of her finest songs to date, closing with an exquisite, howling fit of guitar work.
Repeatedly and unashamedly, the songs on Hunter declare desire—to survive, to play (“Hunter”), to know (“Alpha”), and, tellingly, to find paradise (“Indies Or Paradise”). They propose a utopia of fluidity: “I’ll be the boy, you be the girl / I’ll be the girl, you be the boy / I’ll be the girl,” Calvi repeats on the erotically charged “Chain,” until the words lose their meaning and everyone can just get on with their kinks. And the songs argue for the transcendent power of living from such a place: “Now I feel you completely,” Calvi sings after all acts are dropped on “As A Man,” while elsewhere she renders small moments like eyes meeting or shadows falling in breathtaking high-saturation.
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That Calvi accomplishes all this with a return to relatively straightforward rock arrangements is a testament to her band, which here includes Bad Seed Martyn Casey on bass and Portishead’s Adrian Utley on keys, and to her strengths as a songwriter and performer. Calvi’s songs are simple but dynamic, built for big emotions, and on Hunter, the songs let her guitar playing and singing run free. She delivers equal power in both showy scenes of guitar or vocal exorcism (the end of “Don’t Beat The Girl Out Of My Boy”) and smaller, seemingly more candid moments, like when she slips into that hair-raising falsetto on the title track.
When Calvi first started teasing new music in the spring, flooding her Instagram with siren-red filters, she named artists like Fever Ray and Perfume Genius as influences onthe work,and it’s evident. With Hunter, Calvi joins the defiant celebrations of queer bodies and sexuality happening on albums like last year’s Plunge or No Shape, and it’s a message well-served by her rhapsodic art rock. But more than just grafting on its politics and themes of liberation, Hunter embodies them by capturing a freer, more complex—and queerer—view of its creator. Anna Calvi is on the loose.
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Hunter is the third studio album by English singer-songwriter Anna Calvi. It was released on 31 August 2018 by Domino.[4] The album was produced by Nick Launay, with additional production by Calvi. The album features Adrian Utley from Portishead and Martyn P. Casey from Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds. Gta online best apartment. At the same time she released a single, 'Don't Beat the Girl Out of My Boy', and announced a European tour in support.[5][6][7]Hunter was received well by critics, earning a five star review in The Guardian, who call it 'glorious and triumphant', and 'a record that succeeds on any terms you try to force upon it,'[8] while Pitchfork Media rated it 7.8 out of 10 and praise Calvi's 'remarkable evolution on Hunter' which 'pushes her artistry to another level'.[9]
Calvi enlisted director Matt Lambert to produce the video for title track 'Hunter'. Dazed labelled it 'an exploration of queer intimacy and self-love.'[10]
Track listing[edit]
All tracks written by Anna Calvi.
Personnel[edit]
Credits adapted from the liner notes of Hunter.[13]
Charts[edit]
References[edit]
Retrieved from 'https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Hunter_(Anna_Calvi_album)&oldid=884845722'
The pirate plague of the dead testing god models. On her first album in five years, the goth-rock guitar virtuoso abandons her typically detached perspective to ruminate on gender, sexuality, and identity with newfound urgency.
Featured Tracks:
“Don’t Beat the Girl out of My Boy” --Anna CalviVia
Torrent Anna Calvi Hunter Youtube
In the seven years since she released her self-titled debut album, British singer-songwriter Anna Calvi has reached a rarefied level of critical acclaim. Her haunting, operatic voice and complex guitar playing, rough and gentle at once, have made her the darling of the UK press. Calvi’s songs get heavy rotation on BBC Radio 6, and she has two Mercury Prize nominations to her name. But virtuosity doesn’t always yield inspiration. While 2013’s One Breath and the 2014 EP Strange Weather continued to showcase her considerable talent for lovelorn, gothic rock, they also felt a bit too familiar, as though Calvi had reached the peak of her impressive abilities too soon.
So it feels like there is a lot riding on Hunter, Calvi’s third full-length album and her first in five years. Musically, it’s on par with much of her earlier work, from the sparsity of the guitars to the way her lush, cavernous contralto swells between the searing riffs. But while she used to have the distant air of a demigoddess singing about how us mortals experience love, her perspective on Hunter feels looser, wilder, more intimate. Opener “As a Man” slinks along with finger-snaps and muted guitar licks, as Calvi whispers, “If I was a man in all but my body/Oh would I now understand you completely.” It’s ear-catching and eye-opening, this previously unseen aspect of a persona usually shrouded in theatrical pomp and romance.
“I believe that gender is a spectrum,” Calvi wrote on Instagram recently, in the same post where she announced Hunter. “I believe that if we were allowed to be somewhere in the middle, not pushed to the extremes of performed masculinity and femininity, we would all be more free.” That message—and more of Calvi’s ruminations on gender, sexuality, and identity—burst forth in every song on the album, giving her tried-and-true musical prowess a renewed sense of purpose. Her lyrics have often dealt with mysterious women, beginning with her debut single “Jezebel” and “Suzanne and I,” a sweeping track from her first album. On One Breath, she sang of “Eliza,” a woman who bewitched Calvi with her charm. But the sexuality on Hunter feels more frenzied, more carnal. The album’s cover art adds a visual element to this aesthetic: Head thrown back, slicked with sweat, Calvi looks dazed but powerful.
Hunter’s lead single, “Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy,” is the perfect encapsulation of Calvi’s new songwriting focus. In her sustained notes and androgynous vibrato, she channels the patron saint of rock‘n’roll gender benders, David Bowie. The song has a sexy swagger, its beat heavy and swaying, until the bridge, when she lets out a long, fierce primal wail, the culmination of her pent-up patriarchal angst. For an artist so controlled, it’s a thrilling moment of abandon, and you wonder if this reckless version of Calvi has always existed under the placid surface.
Calvi’s sound is recognizable enough here to please her loyal listeners: “Hunter” uses her trademark blossoming chord progressions to craft an epic ballad; her fingerwork makes a genuine lullaby of the dreamlike “Swimming Pool.” But her remarkable evolution on Hunter pushes her artistry to another level. To say that Anna Calvi has found her voice with her third album would be reductive; both literally and figuratively, her voice has always been crystal clear. Yet she’s certainly found a new way of speaking, one that uses her musical mastery to communicate something truly urgent.
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