Trembling To The Beat

Annie @ Tribeca Grand 4/14/2005
Intro / Helpless Fool For Love / Always Too Late / Chewing Gum / Come Together / The Wedding // Heartbeat

Annie “Chewing Gum (Headman Vocal Mix)” – It’s not as good as the regular mix, but you all know that one, right? If not, get on it.

To my surprise and delight, Annie performed last night with a full band. It was a very good call. Some people can pull off the singing-over-prerecorded-tracks thing fairly well if they have the vocal chops and/or a commanding presence (see: M.I.A.), but Annie’s voice is so thin and her persona is so understated that the full-band approach is definitely the way to go. It’s also very appropriate for the material. Though Annie’s music is firmly rooted in chart pop and dance music, the songs themselves are more like Goldfrapp, early Bjork, or late period Radiohead in that they draw on the textures of electronic pop while only occasionally sounding like something you’d actually play for a dancefloor. And this is the secret of Annie’s success; the reason why she can get a lot of indie-ish people on her side who might not otherwise care very much about Europop.

The live set was brief but mostly quite impressive. The first few songs sounded a little tentative, but once they got to “Chewing Gum,” they hit their stride. “Chewing Gum” was rearranged significantly but not dramatically – the bass carried the groove, the keyboards were less prominent, and the “hey Annie…” and “c’mon Annie…” parts were sung by her keyboard player through a vocoder. The other highlight of the set was a brand new song called “The Wedding,” which featured an instantly catchy vocal hook (“will you marry me? / I do I do I do!”) and excellent, bouncey synths that reminded me of Speaking In Tongues-era Talking Heads. Interestingly enough, this was by far her most confident vocal performance of the evening. After a brief encore tease, Annie played “Heartbeat,” which was just as good as I hoped it would be, although it was slightly spoiled for me by the two obnoxious model-y girls a foot away from me who would NOT. STOP. TALKING. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Richie Havens “Going Back To My Roots (Twitch Edit)” – Ah, finally I have something that will sound perfect after that Larry Levan remix of The Celestial Choir. (Long term readers will know what I mean. If not, fire up the slsk, man.) It’s all about that classic disco piano sound, but Havens’ gravelly, soulful voice pushes it over the top. Classic. (Click here for the Optimo website.)

All the links should be okay as of this edit – the extensions of all the links had changed slightly, and I had to go back and put in all the new versions of the URLs for everything linked from the server.