Songs From the Coal Mine Canary could very well be Cruella De Vil's long lost album, what with Little Annie Bandez merging eerie and sexy, warm and fuzzy as sultrily as her two-dimensional Disney counterpart smokes skinny cigarettes. Except you couldn't vilify Little Annie any more than you could demonize a puppy: Bandez is harmless, taking carpe diem to dizzying, exhausting heights, and finding inspiration, perhaps a little nauseatingly, in everything.
Little Annie-- who is allegedly an ordained minister-- has no shortage of other monikers and hobbies. Sometimes she goes by Annie Anxiety; in lieu of high school she fronted Annie & the Asexuals, whom Frank Zappa saw at a New York venue and enjoyed, later calling them "real personal and disorganized" (held-over teen angst becomes apparent on Songs). Myriad job titles include: "adventuress," "juvenile delinguint," and "post modern cabaret queen." She's a "self-taught painter" and "multimedia artist," painting religious-themed paintings of bright saints with halos in the colors of girls' dresses.
Likewise, when it comes to music, she's a prolific genre-hopper (Reggae! Hip-hop!) and collaborator (Coil!). Produced by Antony (of, and the Johnsons) and Joe Buedenholzer (Backworld), Songs From the Coal Mine Canary seeks a coat tail ride on Antony's recent success. And while the album is mostly cohesive-- while there are, indeed, truly lovely moments, usually involving jazzy piano parts-- it somehow still sounds like a collection of experiments.
This is music for drama kids to dye their hair black to after school: passionate and wholly heartfelt, to be sure, but surface-level. Once upon a time, Annie recited words to a weird Coil song-- sounding profound, or trying to-- and it's the same with "Freddy and Me", which is to say, like spoken magnetic poetry. While the smoky snarl of "derma covers all" resembles deepness, it ultimately doesn't say much. Boycut and low-voiced, Little Annie croons "If I Were a Man" but gender swaps less gracefully than Antony's warbling "For Today I am a Boy": her version seems more like entertaining a flitting thought, a passing "What if?"-- "I'd be the type of man with a blue-eyed bitch at every port"-- than Antony's bone-chilling meditation.
