J-Sin @ Smother.net
I knew I’d thoroughly enjoy this album by San Francisco singer/songwriter Anamude before even listening to one note. Why? Because the label that released this is Keep Recordings and they do no wrong. Honestly I don’t know of anything they’ve put out in their short existence that I haven’t loved. And sure enough I wasn’t disappointed. Her sound is quirky—check out the eccentric samples on album opener “A Dim-lit Road”—and she has no problem embracing that odd side of her. Most singer/songwriters stick to the same formula time after time but that’s where Anamude takes it a step further using vibraphones, optigan, mellotron, viola, and a whole host of other sounds and samples to melt her unique soul onto tape. If this is the direction that folk pop is taking, than they better be considering selling season tickets for that close seat at the coffeehouse.



Jeff Marsh @ Delusions of Adequacy
San Francisco’s Anamude has a unique approach to the singer/songwriter genre. The opening instrumental “A Dim-lit Road” sets the stage for a release of quiet yet intimately moving acoustic-driven songs that are influenced by folk, pop, and even blues. Joined by members of the Decemberists, Norfolk & Western, and Tracker, Anamude fills her lush but light songs on Pentimento with drums, bass, viola, piano, organ, mellotron, vibraphones, and more, but always at the forefront is her voice and her acoustic guitar.

And that voice is enough to give her songs her own unique flair. Almost impossible to describe, it’s a bit monotone yet still full of inflection, with a kind of off-kilter tunefulness that brings to mind PJ Harvey or Kristen Hersh, and while it can be a bit disconcerting, it’s also oddly soothing, almost an instrument in itself. Take, for example, the oddly discordant “No One #2,” which features almost all Anamude’s voice and some unusual percussion. There’s finger-snapping accompaniment on “The Train’s Here” and the oddly monotone-sung vocals mixing with pretty strings and strangely plucked/struck notes of “Improbably Airplane.” But then there’s also the quiet and lovely, almost atmospheric approach to “Distance and the Flood” and the delicate yet almost amazingly pretty ending to “New Leaves,” which is surely my favorite moment on this album.

The best track here is likely “Confetti in the Sea,” a wonderful folk-influenced song where the acoustic guitar simultaneously chimes and strikes, and the backing cymbals truly give the feel of waves crashing. On “The Night Was Just Black,” the guitar is nearly jazzy and complimented by lush strings. And everything comes together on the wonderful folk-influenced “Faded Things.” Here, Anamude’s guitar is perfect, her voice subtle but moving, and the great booming percussion lends the song an impressive weight.

Pentimento requires active listening rather than passive. For while Anamude’s guitar and the rich instrumentation may be sweet at times, it’s also a little off-kilter, with unique time changes and unusual flows. The result is often pretty, often unusually striking. And the artwork, as to be expected from the excellent KEEP Recordings, is just as pretty and striking. Truly a nice package.



Steve @ reallyrather
Anamude is a San Francisco songwriter with a talent for approaching acoustic guitar-based folk pop from both comfortingly familiar and original directions. Pentimento is her first full-length release after EPs with First Flight (2002) and French label hinah (2003). Traveling up the coast to Portland to record with the backing of local musicians (including a member of The Decemberists) her guitar and voice are ornamented by the presence of clattering percussion, floating nimbuses of chimes and vibes, and the classic pastoral folk sepia-tones of the mellotron. At other times this accompaniment is stripped back to leave only the sounds of her voice and fingers coaxing sounds from the strings and wood.

The album begins instrumentally with a “Dim-lit Road.” Wordless, some gentle acoustic strumming and harmonics, washes of backwards cymbal and dropped-on-the-floor percussion, and the settling in of a sparse quietude indeed bring to mind a lonely dirt road lit only by headlights. Her voice enters on “No-One #2,” multi-tracked over a ticking and chiming rhythm of muted guitar string and percussion sounding like a duet between grandfather clock and drying machine. Plainspoken, shy, and feminine, her voice is a nice complement to her guitar meditations. She doesn’t take any hippy-dippy risks with her vocal range, like say Joanna Newsom or Fursaxa, nor does she have the story-telling lyrical attack of someone going for a Joni Mitchell or Ani DiFranco vocal presence. So it’s inoffensive and honest, and very nice when she harmonizes with herself, but perhaps a bit too wall-flowery to make a distinct impression. But there is something about this subtle and distanced quality that is hauntingly beautiful, like on the solo country-blues of “Honey.” Hearing that played on a porch at sunset would make pretty much anyone wistful. Elsewhere, her swells of acoustic picking and strumming are joined by twinkling piano and viola, and the final song “The Place I Would Wait” is performed over the crackling of a warm fire.

The moods of these songs are perhaps too gentle and cozy for everyone’s taste, but the record certainly avoids typically embarrassing and indulgent singer-songwriter fare. Whether it avoids typical indie-singer-songwriter trappings I wasn’t as convinced, but I would recommend this to people who have enjoyed records by Cat Power, Hem, and that recent Vashti Bunyan reissue.



Marco Rivera @ Splendid
San Francisco-based acoustic chanteuse Ana Hortillosa's full-length debut comes off, perhaps unintentionally, as an arresting exercise in genre subversion. Hortillosa's previous efforts have favored stark guitar and piano compositions, but the availability of a larger sound-making arsenal hasn't made her material any less haunting; vibraphones, viola, drums, bass, optigan and mellotron (provided by members of The Decemberists, Norfolk & Western and Tracker) flesh out these atmospherically monotone tunes with a touch of elegance and indie sophistication. Oblique cuts like "Distance And The Flood" or the ragged "The Place I Would Wait" embellish their low-key intimacy with lethargic quirkiness, while "Improbable Airplane"'s beautifully subtle string arrangements and "One Good Dress"'s hypnotic vibe work demonstrate the benefits of sonic growth.

Whereas traditional guitar-based singer/songwriter mythology centers around openness, earnestness and willingness to share an artistic utopia, Anamude's take on the subject seems to hinge on a quietly voluptuous sense of inertia and absentmindedness. It doesn't so much reach out to the Other; it prefers to merely fascinate. Rather than communicating her confessional impulses, Anamude obliterates meaning, leaving only floating layers of almost-ambient texture. After brittle, touching arpeggios spill like dusty, scattered coils of sound from shimmering instrumental opener "A Dim-lit Road", Hortillosa's voice emerges, with a mesmerizing, caressing elusiveness that invites comparisons to autistic anti-diva Chan Marshall. Kristin Hersh and Mirah also come to mind, completing Anamude's picture of feminine bipolarity. She is enigmatic, aloof and detached, but also moving and fragile -- and soothing, and dreamy, and disconcertingly alienating, too.



Kristen Schaer @ Performer
The sum and the parts of Pentimento, Anamude’s newest album, are mutually beautiful and distinctive in their own right. Like Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, which utilized unconventional objects and noises to make one of 2002’s seminal records, Ana Hortillosa (Anamude) creates a wonderful world of cohesive background noise through clacks, creaks, bumps, and thumps. Hortillosa understands the crafting of a pop song with an alt-country/bluegrass-y feel, revealing her skill as she builds these songs from the ground up, enriching them with her phenomenal guitar and violin playing.

Pentimento, an Italian word meaning contrition, is certainly evident in the off-kilter voice and creative phrasing of Hortillosa’s sometimes dirge-like, keening voice. Most of the songs are nature or organically oriented, featuring either the simulated sounds of the outdoors or lyrics about nature.

The songs have titles that could inspire short stories in and of themselves, although sometimes the way the songs come together, the combination of Hortillosa’s intricate playing and the sheer number of instruments and sounds overshadow her words.

“A Dim-Lit Road,” an instrumental with almost improvisational-sounding guitar, starts the record off with the signature sounds of ball-rolling and clacking, and eventually slows to a crawl before coming to a stop.

“Confetti in the Sea,” which conjures a beautiful picture of colors splayed across the amorphous water, has Hortillosa’s pensive guitar strumming, like the gathering of one’s thoughts. A nice touch is the cymbals made to sound like waves. Oftentimes in the song, her voice sounds like Exile in Guyville-era Liz Phair.

The phrasing of her lyrics and playing, delightfully surprising background noises, and pop sensibility come through the strongest in the last part of the album, in “Honey,” “Running,” and “The Train’s Here.” In these songs, Hortillosa excels at guitar and violin, and its apparent she has spent a good many hours with a precise and attuned ear for melodies, interesting note sequences, and inventive, intuitive blends of sound.

An album very rarely engages all the senses with all the peripheral and foreground noises - the instruments mimicking the sounds of the ocean, the feeling of a road trip, even the many shades of penitence - that are encapsulated so fluently in Anamude’s Pentimento.



Beat The Indie Drum
Pentimento is a nice, pleasant experimental folk album. The vocalist reminds me a good deal of Cat Power and some of the acoustic plucking is rather John Fahey at times. Anamude starts adding more to the mix towards the end of the album. "Faded Things" is the least experimental, most full-sounding track on the album with a healthy dose of 'big' drums and strings. It also lacks vocals which is most welcome as Anamude's voice can become a bit cumbersome about halfway through the album. However, I expect this album to improve with repeated listens. It definitely has a downhome feel to it, that of which I am a huge sucker for. This will definitely appeal to fans of the new Wyrd Folk revolution.



SeeWhatYouHear
The first full-length release from Anamude (Ana Hortillosa) is a sensual little record, not in the sense that it could be the new soundtrack to your love-making, but in a way that makes listening to it feel like someone's placing your hand in the sand, scattering some pebbles at your feet while some leaves blow by you, or uttering a whisper only a centimetre away from your cheek. Although technically there are many more instruments and players this time out, it really doesn't feel like it - and much of that has to do with the ghostly presence that persists through the song-writing of the San Francisco based artist; somewhat fitting, considering she once saw the instrument as an ornament of disappointment, staring back at her like "a ghost I couldn't shake."

The opening track, "A Dim-lit Road," is a lovely, eloquent instrumental similar to the introductions that the wonderful M. Ward springs at the feet of his albums (there's a connection, too: Hortillosa is backed up on the album by Norfolk and Western duo Rachel Blumberg and Adam Selzer), which is no bad thing - as we all should know by now. What follows is a series of quiet, sparse sounding songs intricately filled with a handful of elements: Anamude's vocals never stray too far from similar melodies (and when doubled by an overdub, sounds like a pair of twin sisters singing in their bedroom on a rainy day), the guitar is content just to do what it needs to, taking tiny steps up and down a spiral staircase that leads one from self-conscious to self-confident (usually at irregular matchings of time measures, out of the way to the rest of the world), and Blumberg's excellent brush work occasionally complimented by the motion of various sounds simply dropping from the hand to lie where it may.

This album is like a quiet, beautiful girl who keeps to herself - you may find yourself charmed, intrigued, longing…but she isn't here simply to please you; if you can picture this little world one day holding onto you intimately, you'll have to make the effort. And by all means, you should feel that way: literary poetics breeze along the many gorgeous highlights, such as the wispy turning of "Confetti in the Sea," the sliding guitar reverie closing out "New Leaves," the reverb of an empty room on "Honey," the quaint, entirely pretty interlude of "The Train's Here," and the crackling fire on the final touch of calm on "The Place I Would Wait." Pentimento could be an endearing, neatly decorated bottle of something mysterious catching your eye on a handicrafts stall - aural moisturiser.



Andy Tefft @ Indieworkshop
Anamude is a San Francisco songwriter with a talent for approaching acoustic guitar-based folk pop from both comfortingly familiar and original directions. Pentimento is her first full-length release after EPs with First Flight (2002) and French label hinah (2003). Traveling up the coast to Portland to record with the backing of local musicians (including a member of The Decemberists) her guitar and voice are ornamented by the presence of clattering percussion, floating nimbuses of chimes and vibes, and the classic pastoral folk sepia-tones of the mellotron. At other times this accompaniment is stripped back to leave only the sounds of her voice and fingers coaxing sounds from the strings and wood.

The album begins instrumentally with a “Dim-lit Road.” Wordless, some gentle acoustic strumming and harmonics, washes of backwards cymbal and dropped-on-the-floor percussion, and the settling in of a sparse quietude indeed bring to mind a lonely dirt road lit only by headlights. Her voice enters on “No-One #2,” multi-tracked over a ticking and chiming rhythm of muted guitar string and percussion sounding like a duet between grandfather clock and drying machine. Plainspoken, shy, and feminine, her voice is a nice complement to her guitar meditations. She doesn’t take any hippy-dippy risks with her vocal range, like say Joanna Newsom or Fursaxa, nor does she have the story-telling lyrical attack of someone going for a Joni Mitchell or Ani DiFranco vocal presence. So it’s inoffensive and honest, and very nice when she harmonizes with herself, but perhaps a bit too wall-flowery to make a distinct impression. But there is something about this subtle and distanced quality that is hauntingly beautiful, like on the solo country-blues of “Honey.” Hearing that played on a porch at sunset would make pretty much anyone wistful. Elsewhere, her swells of acoustic picking and strumming are joined by twinkling piano and viola, and the final song “The Place I Would Wait” is performed over the crackling of a warm fire.

The moods of these songs are perhaps too gentle and cozy for everyone’s taste, but the record certainly avoids typically embarrassing and indulgent singer-songwriter fare. Whether it avoids typical indie-singer-songwriter trappings I wasn’t as convinced, but I would recommend this to people who have enjoyed records by Cat Power, Hem, and that recent Vashti Bunyan reissue.



KZSU Zookeeper
Anamude creates music unlike anyone else. It’s a blend on John Fahey esque acoustic guitar work and beautifully quirky, & sometimes drony vocal melodies. Anamude’s songs seem more like paitings than songs, small strokes of sound and syncopated guitar rhythm work build and change like colors and texture on a canvas. This record was beautifully recorded by Adam Selzer (Type foundry studio) and arraged with sounds of bottles rolling, electronics, strings and various experimental percussion sounds. Based in a folk tradition this record crosses that line and lands somewhere closer to Gastr Del Sol than to Joni Mitchell. This is a great record and should be played vigorously.