in|FLUX

Album review

With her unusual, mannered vocals, off-balance arrangements, and intimate, incisive delivery, Londoner Anna B Savage got the attention of many colleagues right from the start of her music career and was touring with the likes of Jenny Hval and Father John Misty on the strength of her 2015 debut EP. While it was produced with D.M. Stith, she enlisted onetime Mercury Prize nominee William Doyle to produce her full-length and City Slang debut, 2021's A Common Turn. For the follow-up, she switched up producers again, this time working with Tunng's Mike Lindsay, whom she joined in the studio with unfinished songs in hand and a plan to rely on interplay and spontaneity for finishing touches. She also subtly expands her sound here, adding instruments like saxophone and clarinet as well as electronic kalimba to a palette that's parts indie rock and parts delicate chamber music. With lyrics concerned with humanity and its many complex contradictions, in|FLUX begins with the aftermath of love on the appropriately eerie "The Ghost." It opens with a spoken-word segment ("And he was like, 'Look, when we used to brush our teeth, I would brush our teeth thinking that it was gonna be forever, but it wasn't'") over throbbing bass and percussion before gradually introducing sung vocals, one-note-at-a-time piano, clarinet accents, spacy sound effects, and occasional clicking, thudding drums and hi-hat. Consistently theatrical but intimate, the song increases in volume, adding components like strummed guitar and active tom drums as Savage's plea -- "Stop haunting me/Please/Just leave me be" -- gets more insistent. While the rest of in|FLUX maintains that song's often captivating sense of brewing urgency and poignancy, arrangements alter as it passes through even sparser balladry ("I Can Hear the Birds Now," "Hungry"), skittering, full-kit indie rock ("Pavlov's Dog," "Crown Shyness"), the eventual acoustic cacophony of "Say My Name," and an art-funky title track. Throughout, sounds like guitar chord transitioning, breaths, and imperfect sticking were not only left in the mix but encouraged. In the same vein, the album ends with its arguably most tuneful entry, "The Orange," whose final version includes a wrong chord that Savage preferred and supplanted into the chord structure. After the previous 35 minutes' very human sexual and emotional longing, compromises, and acceptance that good things are often fleeting, "The Orange" closes on the triumphant-in-context sentiment "It's a small miracle to finally enjoy being me/And if this is all that there is/I think I'm gonna be fine."

© Marcy Donelson /TiVo