Brooklyn-based musician, songwriter and videographer Anjali Rose started recording music as part of bands like Ginger Libations in Western Massachusetts, though soon moved on to solo work that strayed across genres to capture a distinctively intimate style. “These songs are the inner workings of my subconscious mind,” she says of latest release, Shadow Works, a multicultural album which blends folk, rock, soul and jazz in experimental ways, as well as drawing from further afield and finding inspiration across the world. A utilisation of all available tools to most faithfully communicate Rose’s interior at a series of specific moments.
Each track on the album comes with a short description of its history, a note of context explaining where and how it was made. “Recorded while touring on Iphone in Oct 2019 in Liam’s basement in Montreal CA,” reads that of opener ‘Miedo’. “Mixed in Reaper that same month in Western MA using Iphone sounds of trees and nature when visiting Emma and friends from Burlington Vermont.” The effect is to anchor each song within a particular time and place, making the album a kind of sonic diary, and acknowledging the influence of surroundings on one’s interior state.
As such, the sound is suitably nuanced. Often gentle and drifting but interspersed with small details, Anjali Rose utilising space as a backdrop across which the assembled components can play. ‘Miedo’ introduces the stark, fingerpicked style, a balance between sadness and grace that levels out as a kind of stillness. This duality exists at the heart of Shadow Works, the different speeds of inside and out juxtaposed and competing.
Lyrically, the songs are mostly sparse. Short verses of short lines and often even less. “Oh please / Tell me,” goes the opening lines of ‘Are You There’, “You’re ok, / you’re alive.” Succinct sentences as they arrive from one’s mind, laid out or set free into the delicately intricate arrangements. Sometimes, as on ‘Expectations’, the songs play like reflective musings, hopes and confessions voiced under the breath as the day unfolds. Other, like the flickering ‘Amigues’ or enveloping closer ‘Beautiful, are more like mantras. Small snatches to be repeated over and over. Protection spells to ward off the dark.
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More than a simple conclusion, closer ‘Beautiful’ acts as a kind of statement of Anjali Rose’s style. One of the most affirming songs on the record that nevertheless acknowledges what came before. Offering hope not as a distinct alternative to the difficulties detailed across the preceding songs but an inherent part of such struggles. An ever present possibility to be seized amid everything else. If Shadow Works is a picture of a mind’s interior, then the mind is something fluid and surprisingly robust. A place where nothing lasts forever but some foundation remains. One at once constant and ever-changing. Picture a spirit moving through the world, altered by all that surrounds it but retaining something of itself throughout everything.
Shadow Works is out now and available from the Anjali Rose Bandcamp page.
