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Published on 8/28/08
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Amy Annelle’s music is haunted. You don’t need to be a psychic to tell this from her albums, which she releases both under her name and as the Places. Last year’s Songs for Creeps is aswim in spirits: A detached male voice opens the album, asking, “Are you there? Hello, hellooo…”; in “My Weary Eye,” one of the record’s more moving pieces, a Native American chant buried deep in the mix calls across the divide to underscore already weighty lyrics: “I know what’s waiting in these amber-colored octaves.… It’s what’s kept in my graveyard / A thousand bodies buried and no marker.”
The ghosts on Annelle’s records are literal; onstage they’re figurative, yet their presence is equally strong. A folksinger in the truest sense, Annelle and her high, lonesome, pretty voice seem to be from no particular time—more like many of them at once. Resembling someone who might’ve been hopping trains with Woody Guthrie, she transmits ages of American troubadour traditions in her performances. But if one of her roles is as a medium, it’s hardly a passive feat; the songs she covers come from and go in all directions. A recent compilation of them, Fawns with Fangs, includes selections by Bert Jansch, Elliott Smith, the Pretty Things and Syd Barrett, and at her last NYC show, an inspired reading of the folk classic “Blues Run the Game” invoked the essence of the original while flinging the song into the here and now. No need to fear these ghosts, though; just celebrate them.
