Strange Weather, an EP featuring five new covers, sounds like an extension of Anna Calvi’s debut single, 2010’s “Jezebel”, which remains arguably her best song and certainly a deft means of introduction to her commanding voice. Originally a hit for Frankie Laine in 1951, it’s been covered often in various languages and genres, although most versions gently reinforce the song’s matter-of-fact pop sexism. Borrowing from Edith Piaf’s cover (“c’était toi!”), Calvi turns the song into a flamenco rock aria, her voice soaring accusatorily and her guitar providing sinister commentary. With its emotions blown up to operatic scale, “Jezebel” plays less like a woman-baiting lament and more like a powerful fanfare. Calvi may sing in second person, but she embraces the role of Jezebel as one of immense power.
That single introduced Calvi as a song interpreter with unique vocal power and timbre as well as versatile guitar chops, but her first two albums—2011’s Anna Calvi and last year’s weirdly under-the-radar One Breath—settled into a more workaday singer-songwriter mode. For that reason, a covers EP sounds like a natural and promising endeavor, one that lets her concentrate exclusively on crafting nuanced performances. She could easily level a small city with her voice, but instead chooses to emphasize subtlety and incremental shades of mood on these five songs. “Papi Pacify” becomes a slow blues seduction, not too far from FKA twigs’ original in tone and setting, but Calvi draws out the "ooh"’s leading up to the chorus and settles into the languorous guitar chords afterwards. The song takes on a pattern of tension and release that sounds slyly sexual.
Subtlety and restraint are, refreshingly, crucial to Strange Weather. She dials her vocals back considerably for Keren Ann’s “Strange Weather”, a duet with David Byrne, which sounds like a quiet moment after some great cataclysm. Even the climax of “I’m the Man, That Will Find You” plays things close to the chest, as Calvi relegates the dramatic wailing to the background in order to make her measured lead more prominent. Connan Mockasin’s original still sounds like a put-on—a half-joke built on aspic-wobbly vocals and a winking slink of a groove—yet Calvi takes the lyrics at face value and rescues the song from such fatal irony. Even so, its power lays not so much in her vocals but in her guitar playing, as she draws out that central riff like it’s an old delta blues lick.
None of these covers is quite as transformed as “Jezebel”, so nothing on Strange Weather delivers the same subversive charge. Partly that’s due to her choice in material, which for the most part is recent and more indie-oriented. So it’s odd that the two oldest tunes on here fare the worst. Her version of Suicide’s “Ghost Rider” may play a bit with gender roles, but it’s so beholden to the original that it comes across as post-apocalyptic karaoke, more tedious than thrilling. And closer “Lady Grinning Soul” foregoes the cosmic pomp and self-regard of Bowie’s early ‘70s original for an easy elegiac tone that allows Strange Weather to simply dissipate into the ether. Her restraint is commendable, but on these two songs it curdles into something like hesitation.
