Anna Calvi - Hunter

Anna Calvi – Hunter (Domino)

 “I want to go beyond gender,” wrote the British singer in an online essay this spring. “I don’t want to have to choose between the male and female in me. I’m fighting against feeling an outsider and trying to find a place that feels like home.”

Because Calvi doesn’t yet feel at home anywhere else, the house she constructs is stunning in its construction, beautiful in its vision. Her operatic voice, occasionally explosive guitar work and balance of grit and class draws elements from PJ Harvey, St. Vincent and Florence Welch, and her choice of collaborators here—Nick Launay (Yeah Yeah Yeahs), Adrian Utley (Portishead) and Martyn Casey (Nick Cave’s Bad Seeds)—provide some obvious signposts. The more lush tracks here (“Swimming Pool,” “Eden”) also echo Goldfrapp’s 2000 debut, Felt Mountain, in which a seductive, classically trained voice (Calvi has a degree in music) sounds like it’s calling across the Alps to a long-lost lover.

Such is the power of Calvi’s voice and the accompanying music that it can overshadow her lyrics, which very much play with gender roles throughout Hunter, her third album. Sometimes she feels she has to hammer you over the head, like when she titles a song with the repeated chorus “Don’t Beat the Girl Out of My Boy”—which also happens to be the poppiest song here. Both on that track and on “Chain” (“I’ll be the boy, you be the girl / I’ll be the girl, you be the boy”), Calvi lets loose a wail that sounds like Merry Clayton in “Gimme Shelter” or Clare Torry in Pink Floyd’s “Great Gig in the Sky”: operatic gospel that sounds like a spirit leaving the body.

“I’m alpha,” she sings, toying with a particularly gendered adjective. Yeah, no doubt. When you have this much talent trapped in a tiny body, you’re going to overshadow everyone else around here. Hunter is a hands-down candidate for album of the year.

Personal side note: as someone who has joked about being an Anglophobe when it comes to music, I'll say that Calvi embodies all my favourite British music of the last 25 years. There's no sign of North American dates yet, but I'll be first in line when tickets go on sale. Would it be too much to ask if she took Perfume Genius on the road with her?

Stream: "As a Man," "Hunter," "I’m Alpha”