Anna Nalick - "Wreck of the Day"
(Sony, 2005) * * * 1/2
With her debut album, Anna Nalick has made a serious impression on pop radio. And all it took was the few short lines which began her song "Breathe (2AM)":
2 a.m. and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake
"Can you help me unravel my greatest mistake
I don't love him; winter just wasn't my season."
Yeah we walked through the doors, so accusing their eyes
Like they have any right at all to criticize
Hypocrites, you're all here for the very same reason
'Cause you can't jump the track, you're like cars on a cable
And life's like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button girl
So cradle your head in your hands
And breathe, just breathe.
I was blown away the first time I heard the song on WLBC this past winter. Its sound seemed to sum up everything modern pop isn't; coupling intelligent lyrics with a thoughtfully produced piano-based background just isn't cool anymore, or so one would think.
What Anna Nalick has managed to do is combine the best elements of Sarah McLaughlin, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos's musical sense with her own wry, road-weary lyrics, creating an album that sounds like a classic the moment you start listening.
"What if I fall, what if I don't, what if I never make it home?" she asks at the beginning of citadel, exposing exactly what makes her songs so immediately magnetic. Here's a young woman who has all the same insecurities as all of us, but she packages it up in an upbeat manner, with a sophistication that belies her age. The album plays out as something of a linked series of diary entries, expressing what it is like to live in today's world. But it's important to note that Nalick succeeds where many of her contemporaries have failed -- she is able to, through these songs, make us forget we're essentially listening to a coffeehouse performer. The songs rarely fall into folky-pop alternative cliches.
It helps that Nalick writes her own songs. Unlike many pop "singer-songwriters" of today, we can believe her when she sings something; they're her words, not those of a Matrix-like songwriting team. Working with an amazing production duo (Christopher Thorn and Brad Smith, the founding members of the nineties-era group Blind Melon) Nalick was able to put together an album that fits her style, her vision, and her talents.
All of which makes an album that may fly under the radar but which you should hear if you have any hope that "pop" and "filler" don't always need to be synonymous.
With her debut album, Anna Nalick has made a serious impression on pop radio. And all it took was the few short lines which began her song "Breathe (2AM)":
2 a.m. and she calls me 'cause I'm still awake
"Can you help me unravel my greatest mistake
I don't love him; winter just wasn't my season."
Yeah we walked through the doors, so accusing their eyes
Like they have any right at all to criticize
Hypocrites, you're all here for the very same reason
'Cause you can't jump the track, you're like cars on a cable
And life's like an hourglass glued to the table
No one can find the rewind button girl
So cradle your head in your hands
And breathe, just breathe.
I was blown away the first time I heard the song on WLBC this past winter. Its sound seemed to sum up everything modern pop isn't; coupling intelligent lyrics with a thoughtfully produced piano-based background just isn't cool anymore, or so one would think.
What Anna Nalick has managed to do is combine the best elements of Sarah McLaughlin, Fiona Apple and Tori Amos's musical sense with her own wry, road-weary lyrics, creating an album that sounds like a classic the moment you start listening.
"What if I fall, what if I don't, what if I never make it home?" she asks at the beginning of citadel, exposing exactly what makes her songs so immediately magnetic. Here's a young woman who has all the same insecurities as all of us, but she packages it up in an upbeat manner, with a sophistication that belies her age. The album plays out as something of a linked series of diary entries, expressing what it is like to live in today's world. But it's important to note that Nalick succeeds where many of her contemporaries have failed -- she is able to, through these songs, make us forget we're essentially listening to a coffeehouse performer. The songs rarely fall into folky-pop alternative cliches.
It helps that Nalick writes her own songs. Unlike many pop "singer-songwriters" of today, we can believe her when she sings something; they're her words, not those of a Matrix-like songwriting team. Working with an amazing production duo (Christopher Thorn and Brad Smith, the founding members of the nineties-era group Blind Melon) Nalick was able to put together an album that fits her style, her vision, and her talents.
All of which makes an album that may fly under the radar but which you should hear if you have any hope that "pop" and "filler" don't always need to be synonymous.
posted by Jonathan Sanders @ 8:05 PM
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