Anna Calvi is a bit difficult to place among her peers. The art-rock experiment that was Anna Calvi was much-feted by the British awards press, adopted by the Paris fashion scene and surprisingly robust in sales but had neither the broad appeal of Adele nor the tasteful artiness of James Blake or pre-established icon status of PJ Harvey, the Mercury Prize co-nominees closest to her league. Calvi has much more in common with debuts like Jesca Hoop’s Kismet, Bat for Lashes’ Fur and Gold or Society of Imaginary Friends’ Sadness is a Bridge to Love: a classically trained artist (Calvi studied guitar and violin at university for years before her solo career) with big-name fans (Calvi's include Nick Cave and Brian Eno), Calvi is an artist whose sound and influences are theatrical in the sweeping, near-operatic sense and whose arrangements are dense and knotty and take time to unfurl.
One Breath, Calvi’s follow-up recorded in six weeks in France, is far from a departure. Calvi switches producers from Harvey associate Rob Ellis to John Congleton, a prolific producer among alt-folk types like Shearwater, Sarah Jaffe and especially St. Vincent, who worked with him on Actor and Strange Mercy, but the sound is still Calvi: alternately haunting, like a lost noir theme, or just a bit more disarming than you’d expect. The album’s heavier on the latter, being a shade darker and angrier than its precursor, the product of a tumultuous year. (Calvi is far more vulnerable in music than in interviews; she’s cited the death of a loved one as an inspiration for One Breath, but either sidesteps or dismisses any other further explanations journalists have offered up.) “It’s… very thrilling to feel you're out of control and don't know what's going to happen, but it’s also scary,” Calvi told The Observer recently. Hence the title track, which sprawls like a minute in slow motion. Calvi sings barely above a breath: “I’ve got one, one second to live/ before I say what I’ve got to say,” then gives the track first to distortion, then to an orchestral finale that materializes out of it. It’s the sort of subtle structure, plotted like a film—Calvi has mentioned writing her songs in such a manner—that’s easy to miss but rewarding if you don’t.
This isn’t to say One Breath is a subtle album; in fact, it’s best when it’s not. The meticulous “Piece By Piece” is impressive in a methodical way, as it runs through indignant guitar solos, then muted synth lines, then bursting, romantic strings, like unraveling a relationship in reverse. It’s easier still to admire the late-album sequence of the grungy “Love of My Life", where Calvi works herself up then catches her breath, then “Carry Me Over", a five-and-a-half-minute, largely instrumental composition that’s a showcase for all Calvi’s training: anxious marimba, guitar both sedate and squealing and string atmospherics; these two tracks together would constitute a career high. But throughout the album are simpler concepts: the poised cod-Wagnerian attack of “Tristan", after which the titular hero might as well either drop his armor or drop dead; the lilting bass, sweep of strings and ghostly backing vocals of “Sing To Me", which could have arisen from the mists of a Goldfrapp pastoral; or the choral haze of “The Bridge” that seems to exist in a separate, more austere universe from anything Calvi or her peers have recorded.
Sadly, of all One Breath’s disparate ideas, not all are so iconoclastic. “Eliza” starts out as an MOR folk song, as if someone heard last album’s single “Desire” and thought it’d make a great Mumford stomper if it weren’t so damn arty. Eventually, a tense “Surgeon” guitar solo and operatic coda half-redeem the arrangement, but they’re too late and too short-lived. The sludgy “Bleed Into Me” slips from drama into melodrama without much fuss either way, and a brief guitar freakout is all that keeps “Cry” from slipping farther still, into the territory of Leona Lewis. Paradoxically, One Breath being such a musically omnivorous album only worsens matters—on an album with a more consistent sound, any of these tracks might be excused as natural lowlights to its highlights, but One Breath has such a surfeit of ideas that they just come off as the weaker ones that weren’t cut.
As problems go, though, this isn’t so bad. Calvi’s said the recording process for One Breath was quite fast for her, requiring her to rely on quick decisions more than revision, and perhaps that bears part of the blame. Calvi’s synthesized enough musical styles for at least three artists, and she’s clearly got ample chops to pull any of them off. She’s born to make a grand concept album one day. What she needs now is that grand concept.
