Anamon is a Rochester-based indie rock outfit led by songwriter Ana Emily Monaco. We wrote about the band’s debut release, Stubborn Comfort, at the tail end of 2017, praising a record we saw as “wonderfully unfussy and immediate” that “unfurl[ed] into something surprisingly raw and personal.” Formed in response to heartache and often inspired by dreams, Stubborn Comfort felt like an ode to classic folk and country, a contemporary retelling of unrequited love and cowboy loneliness.
Today we’re thrilled to share their follow-up record, Purple, Green, and Yellow, a few days before its release on the 5th October. Thematically, the band are certainly on the same course, detailing the trouble and strife of dealing with other human beings, especially those who seem hell bent on breaking your heart. However, the album sees an evolution of the Anamon sound, reaching far beyond the country and western-inspired indie rock to borrow from genres as diverse as punk, psych and a handful of rocks—hard, classic, garage, math—as well as a more traditional folk.
Which isn’t to says the western vibes are lost. Anamon are still ostensibly a country rock band, with songs such as ‘Outsider’ feeling like direct links to Stubborn Comfort. Even the more divergent tracks feel rooted in the outsider experience that marks the genre, the sensation of being somehow cut off from the regular human experience, separated by will or design or pure bad luck, and doubling down within the role as an act of resistance.
What binds the indie pop momentum of ‘No Friends’, the angry swagger of ‘Iron Bill’ and runaway energy of ‘In Three’ is a determination to fight for the privilege of being oneself, even if that self is reserved or shy or anxious in a world that views such traits with utter contempt. Indeed, Anamon challenge exactly what these features entail, banishing the notion that reserved people have nothing to say, that shy people have no spirit or belief. Therefore, what at first seems something of a contradiction in the Anamon sound—introverted discomfort communicated with sometimes sloppy, sometimes sleazy abandon—is revealed to be no contradiction at all.
Key to all of this is the direction Anamon choose to focus the beam of this revelation. The classic counterculture mode places all focus on the individual, coolness as a complete retreat into the idiosyncrasies of the self, though Monaco appears to reject such self-indulgence. Despite possessing a wry tone, Purple, Green, and Yellow wants more than hip denunciation and cynicism. It wants to help build a community of nonconformists, people intent not on burning the world down, but building a beacon around which others might gather. As Saby Reyes-Kulkarni puts it:
In a time when social civility appears to be falling into ruin, we need more from the punk-rock attitude than just individual angst expressed as a middle finger to the world. No surprise, a band of friends who live together, dine together, and have played together in various guises since their teens gets across a sense of grappling with being in the world rather than against it. Monaco certainly has her middle finger ready throughout Purple, Green & Yellow, but there’s a palpable sense of inclusion and welcoming in her refusal to flinch from uncomfortable truths.
We’re thrilled to be able to share the album a few days before its release, so be sure to take advantage and listen below:
Purple, Green, and Yellow is out on the 5th October and you can pre-order it now from the Anamon Bandcamp page.
Photo by Clay Patrick McBride