Larsen – “Cool Cruel Mouth” – [Important Records]

This 2011 release, the latest full-length from Torino, Italy’s ‘post-rock’ daydreamers (imagine a spacier Bad Seeds) features vocals and lyrics by outsider artist ‘Little’ Annie ‘Anxiety’ Bandez, who has previously collaborated with Nurse With Wound (as has Larsen guitarist Fabrizio Palumbo on a different occasion: last year’s NWW/Blind Cave Salamander collaboration) Crass, Current 93 and Coil, among others. Bandez channels the husky-voiced vulnerability of Marianne Faithful, Patti Smith, or Cat Power over the band’s gorgeously new-wave informed, open-ended theatrics. T.1 winds a vicious drone around an otherwise fairly traditional take on ‘It Was A Very Good Year.’ T.4 and 8 feature piano by Baby Dee (who also wrote the lyrics to the latter). It’s all good but the best track musically and lyrically is 5, where (backed by synth-punk keys) Annie revisits the same spoken-word scenario she imagined on Coil’s classic ‘Things Happen’: a disingenuous encounter with a man at a bar (although this time she’s not a ghost, just a lonely human). The deuteragonist on this album is drummer ‘Il Bue,’ whose relentless precision gives the music an ecstatic momentum. T.4 and 9 are instrumentals. The predominant mood is a palpably unsatisfied yearning for love. Sublime sounds for sensitive weirdos. Yeah I might have teared up a little, what’s it to you?