Anna Gillions

The debut solo album from Anna Gillions, Moving Through, is now available. (Click here to read review)

:  £11.50 incl p&p

1. Moving Through    
2. Can't Stop
3. Every Mother
4. Trust
5. Hey Boy 
6. Don't Walk on the Grass  
7. One Foot in Front
8. Travel Well 
9. Red Light 
10. Running Blind

To listen to sound clips, click here

Anna Gillions is a very talented and versatile instrumentalist who has delivered this refreshingly honest album Moving Through. She sings and plays directly from the heart with a child-like open quality that makes for a fascinating and compelling listen.

Her style is reminiscent of exploratory folk duo Pooka, and at times very early Tracey Thorn (Everything but the Girl). She sings with a raw clarity, often leaping effortlessly to a willowy pure high tone which, like her songs, is untainted by unnecessary ornamentation and slap bang in the centre of the note.

Each song takes the listener on a musical journey through a soundscape made up of driving accoustic or delicate finger-picking guitar over intricate bass lines, interlaced with piano, sax, clarinet and violin. Apart from the first track (featuring Alec Blakemore on accoustic guitar) all instruments are played by the songstress herself. Musicality pours out and I get the feeling she could make a good sound out of anything!

Anna has wisely chosen the recording skills of Artisan's Brian Bedford who has tapped into the simple beauty of this music. Together they have created a very 'real' album, full of feeling and a delight to listen to.

Abbie Lathe (of Maddy Prior and the Girls)

2005

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This impressive CD arrived unsolicited - that's not always a good sign, but in this case I'm sure glad it came, for Anna's quite a discovery. If your taste in singer-songwriters trends away from the tediously strummy babe-clone attitude-and-no-content and more towards the ambitious, musically and vocally interesting, with strongly individual personality and something to say, then Anna's likely to be for you. A fulsome recommendation from Abbie Lathe (of Maddy Prior's Girls) came with the CD, and that in itself is worth much (not just in the respect that their sensibilities would appear to have much in common). Anna's voice has apparently been likened to singers ranging from Kate Bush to Kathryn Williams to Judy Tzuke, but I find her intriguing and sometimes unpredictable manner of singing (embodying a raw, untutored, direct purity and capable of some astonishing leaps) more akin to Pooka (Tash more so than Sharon), or sometimes Bex from Waking The Witch. The Pooka comparison surfaces too in the quite unusual way that Anna structures some of her songs.

An intrinsic honesty and a passion for justice and equality in all things and all matters shines through Anna's music, both in her lyrics and in her deeply committed expression of them; relationships, and the concomitant learning-curves, form the basis for much of Anna's concern, and the resultant anguish is expressed emotionally, as much in the angular and uncomfortable melodic twists and turns (eg. Can't Stop) as in the actual lyrics, as exemplified by the double-edged, cautionary One Foot In Front. That "justice and equality" issue is addressed again in the declamatory "parent struggling against the odds" plea of Every Mother and the chirpy state-of-the-NHS parable Trust. Anna also makes an attractively memorable and nicely succinct contribution to the time-honoured parting-song genre (Travel Well). Instrumentally, Anna's competence on guitar is supplemented by excursions onto piano, saxaphone,clarinet, whistle, violin and drum to provide additional colourings of a sometimes fairly rudimentary but invariably effective nature, while Alec Blakemore augments the first song only with additional guitar.

Anna has plenty of hard-won upfront confidence in the act of performance, and heaps of conviction in what she's doing; and all power to her. But underlying all this, the sometimes wayward nature of her inspiration is that of a gifted child who hasn't yet attained quite the last degree of quality-control in her outpourings, and this leads to an impression of latent insecurity that surfaces from timeto time during thie enterprise, which very probably stems from what Anna's biog refers to as "various moves and life changes". In the creative act, Anna clearly feels a cathartic, hippie-style freedom of expression, and with such a freedom always comes an occasional inescapable ever-so-slightly-gauche quality to the music-making, especially in respect of expressive turns of phrsae and the scattergun nature of some of the lyrics. But this I'm sure will pass, as Anna gains more experience. And I'd rather be in at the "white heat of creativity" stage than have to yawn through an over-manicured and glossy soulless product that's had all the musicality drained out of it. Clearly there can be no charges of "mere vanity CD" levelled at Anna's debut, as it's a Brian Bedford production; like Brian, I have much faith in Anna's future development, and she's definitely a lady to watch. The one puzzling downside to this compelling CD is it's brevity - for in the sheer mass of ideas exploding out of every one of the ten songs, I'm sure Anna has so much more to say than this 35 minutes' worth, which can't necessarily wait until album number two.

David Kidman

February 2006

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