Anne Malin - Fog Area (Self-Released) 2018
9
The overwhelming feeling you get upon first listen of this creepy, beguiling, challenging album is that Miss Malin wants you on your back-foot immediately. Confused, uncomfortable, giddy and looking fruitlessly for the nearest signpost to your comfort-zone. You won’t find it. Opening track “When Flesh Is Enough” is an unsteady, hypnotic trance-like spoken word creation which lulls you ambivalently into the following trip you are about to take entirely unsure of where it will lead.
In actuality, despite the opening tracks attempt at scaring you off before it has even started, Fog Area is an immensely fragile, delicate folk album that conjures images of black magic; romances that lead to murder and love that is permanently tinged with melancholic sorrow. Anne Malin is a sonic alchemist – her lead is music, and the gold she spins from it are each of these wonderfully unique, esoteric songs.
If you like music that tickles the brain as well as the belly and heart then this is worth the listen. You should understand from the start she doesn’t care what you think or what you opinion of her or her music is. She seemingly has no second thought at all beyond this very moment, coasting through first track to last with an errant disregard for anything but the sound she is entangled in – and – it is indelibly the more haunting and worthwhile because of this near fatal nihilism.