Anna von Hausswolff – Live At Montreux Jazz Festival

Southern Lord (CD & US vinyl) / Pomperipossa (vinyl in Europe)

Recorded at the Montreux Jazz Festival back in 2018, this is a powerful testament to the Anna von Hausswolff live experience.

She eases you in gently with the lilting latitudes of “The Truth, The Glow, The Fall’, a folksy saturation pinning you back, a black magic love awash with swelling orchestration, that voice resining the architecture – an incandescent glow instrumentally shifting to this gorgeous discoloured church-like ambience.

Her voice tonally sifting back in miraged tendrils, decanting a witchy Diamanda Galás sign-off that bursts forth (after some cheering and wolf whistles) into the crashing waves of “Pomperipossa”, a gloves-off situation that finds Anna summoning her inner banshee to a surging ceremonial sizzle, cresting vocals washed away on blackening disarray.

A cataclysm re-purposed in the meaty strum and slam dynamics of “The Mysterious Vanishing Of Electra”, oozing a Swans-like intensity that drills straight in there, a real bruiser over which she rides like an operatic Azrael. That weaponised voice squeezing at the emotional content of every word, flooding over in abstracted acrobats, the whole re-contexting the power ballad into a mantra-like gnawing. My head appreciatively nods to its pulsing core and secondary acoustics burn through, then are rebirthed in this strange wah- lustred strangulation and wailing oscillation, that pounding skin finality bathed in enthusiastic applause.

A beautifully brutalised energy that’s refocused in the jet-black serpentines of “Ugly And Vengeful”, a scrying concentrated hex to whining frets and skeletal percussives, then silence. A contrasting plaintive pours in, a sweetness of voice that sours in a dronal gouge as an arterial beat catches hold and that slow mournful flesh-seeking hook of melody creeps on over, wrapped in Lisa Gerrard-like arabesques and demented twitches. Man, this is so good and just gets better as it reactively switch-blades into a massive percussive / guitar burn, full of tribal fireworks and shrieking, then ascends into a satisfying cacophony.

Nineteen minutes of pure brooding pleasure that make this recording a must-have, and something that will return on the fifteen-minute finale; but before that “Källans Återuppståndelse” orchestrally slumbers in, injects a relaxing warmth to the proceedings. A harmonica and lap-steel-fuelled flame, nourishing a heartbreakingly exquisite centre and finds her voice reverbing off the venue’s space, placing you at its centre in a rare and wonderful thing that all live records hope to achieve.

A faultless performance I’d have been overjoyed to experience first hand, finally serving up a outro to remember. The smouldering dilation of “Come Wander With Me – Deliverance” satellites into a blinding doomic / splatter-caked euphoria. Grinding to vocalised evils and tongue dipped slaughter, a pounding cymbal-kissed whirlwind wasping in pure satisfaction, stumbling out the other side into a swollen ambiance, torch-lit by a stunning Kali-esque vocal – wild, intoxicated, pirouetting the kerosene of that carouseling fret-work.

Bloody beautiful juju; you’d be stupid to ignore it.

-Michael Rodham-Heaps-