The title of Amy Annelle's latest solo album, A School of Secret Dangers, quotes John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley. Steinbeck wrote the book after taking a trip across the country, and Annelle's album has a similar feel: collecting eleven songs from four years' worth of home recordings, it takes snapshots of American scenes. With their spare tunes and elliptical lyrics, Annelle's songs are like pinpricks on a vast map.
Amy Annelle has never sung a word she didn't need. On her solo albums and in her work with the Places, she has a perfect sense of how to use silence in her recordings-- neither playing faster to fill the quiet, nor slowing down to create it. She recorded A School of Secret Dangers alone, singing and accompanying herself on guitar. Her vocals are the selling point for the album: Annelle has a compelling voice that can sound both breathy and grounded, dreamy and rough-- like having the bartender sing you a lullaby.
And the album sounds great, considering Annelle recorded it to lo-fi four-track. The ambience is intimate but wide-open, as if she were camping out in her backyard. Silence hangs behind every song, and it's a breathing presence on the quieter numbers-- for example, around the low vocals on "Ugly Stray." The only context comes from the "found sound" between some of the tracks. Annelle also includes recordings of distorted music and talk programs from Christian radio broadcasts. Cribbing from backwater religious radio may not be original, but the dislocated voices are eerily effective.
Compared to the indie pop of her last album, the Places' excellent debut The Autopilot Knows You Best, these songs have simpler tunes and stick closer to country and folk. "The Birds Start Talking English," the upbeat opener, lopes along as Annelle sings about a campfire on a hillside; other songs are more dour, such as "Broke Down," about an abandoned cemetery. The gently catchy melody of "Soft City" carries a description of a city at night, along with vague information about the person who's looking at it. Annelle challenges herself to make these lyrics ambiguous but not meaningless. She generally succeeds, but the more detailed songs have better lines-- check these ones from "Idaho": "We stay up all night listening to your grandpa's 78s/ Til the lights begin to glow and shadow all the lines on your face."
A School of Secret Dangers requires more attention than the immediately likeable Autopilot, but its songs get better with every listen. Their subtlety, when matched with the restraint of Annelle's performance, allow her to explore ideas that she can't approach directly. Annelle implies the emptiness around the places she sings about, and the movement of people through wide open spaces, listening to half-received radio broadcasts. And in doing so, she captures the sound of being alone.
