Anni Rossi is a multi-instrumentalist who began violin training at age three, and has been performing as a solo artist since high school. After relocating to Chicago from Los Angeles, where she studied composition at California Institute of the Arts, the 23-year-old Minnesota native has rounded up a small but dedicated fanbase during extensive tours throughout Europe and the United States.
When I first saw Rossi perform live, in Berlin during summer 2006, she was a member of Carla Bozulich's touring band. Performing her solo set before the headline act, Rossi stole the show with her charmingly nonchalant stage presence and distinctive voice, which was accompanied solely by her viola and a few heated, percussive foot stomps. Like her vocals, which often sound as though they may fall out of tune at any moment yet never do, Rossi's unconventional viola playing is a huge part of her appeal. Rather than bowing the strings, she often prefers to strum and pluck, using the instrument to emphasize and soundtrack her lyrics. On a popular live song, for example, she emulates the sound of her "father shoveling snow" and "cars on icy packed roads" with a fricative scrape of the strings that brings her tale of childhood winters in the Midwest to life.
Anni Rossi's 4AD debut full-length, Rockwell, named after her street in Chicago and keeping to a tradition of titling recordings after places she has lived, is the conclusion of a series of recording experiments taken over the last few years (full disclosure: I was in a band that released music on Too Pure, a label that also released music by Rossi). Her instrumentation is so sparse that it naturally calls for the highest standards of recording to fully translate the relationship between the vocals and strings, so it's not surprising that she chose to record Rockwell with Steve Albini, albeit in a day. The result is far closer in sound to her splendid, confident live shows and less cluttered than her 2007 effort Scandia, which featured an abundance of orchestral touches. New York City based composer Devin Maxwell, who provides effective and unobtrusive drumming to all but one of the songs, and cellist Caroline Burdette are the only other musicians featured on the album and round the songs out nicely without convoluting their essential clarity.
While the majority of Rockwell includes songs that Rossi has had in her repertoire for the last few years, there are a couple of new gems. "Las Vegas", about the pre-fight hopes of an ultimately defeated boxer, is lyrically one of her most powerful songs and shows how stunning music can be when kept stark and simple. Then there's her unlikely take on Ace of Base's "Living in Danger", which is a lighthearted match for her live cover of the Cure's "Inbetween Days" and serves to highlight her considerable appetite for pop music, which is just as present on Rockwell as her capacity for writing songs with classical sensibility. Perhaps most enjoyable of all is that there's something remarkably personable about this album, as though Anni Rossi is right there in the room with you, singing her heart out about beekeeping in the Himalayas, her love for freezer units, and the troubles of driving to the west coast with no air conditioning.
