Anohni – ‘My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross’ review: a sublime soul reinvention

5 July, 2023

Anohni

Anohni’s last album, 2016’s stark, cold and appropriately titled ‘HOPELESSNESS’ confronted the climate apocalypse with brute electronic force. From the moment ‘My Back Was A Bridge…’ opens with ‘It Must Change’ – all slow licks of warm guitar and distant swells of strings – it’s clear that this is something altogether different. Anohni’s voice has always had a deep soulfulness, but she’s never before operated in a sonic environment quite so suited to it.

It’s feted soul producer Jimmy Hogarth, best known for his work with Amy Winehouse and Duffy, who plays that guitar. Semi-improvised to Anohni’s lyrics live in the studio, it snakes not only through ‘It Must Change’ but the entire record. On ‘Scapegoat’ it climbs and tumbles through Badalamenti-style arpeggios. On ‘There Wasn’t Enough’ it retreats into sparse and delicate acoustic folk.

There are blasts of harshness (‘Go Ahead’’s fuzzed-out polemic, or ‘Scapegoat’’s bombastic crescendo) but ‘My Back Was A Bridge…’ is still, by some distance, the most accessible thing she’s ever made. Though much of its palette is drawn from ‘classic’ music of the past, however, the record’s brilliance lies in the way it doesn’t retreat from the present. “Why am I alive now? / watching all the water dry / watching the sky fall to the earth / birds and insects looking for a place to hide” Anohni sings on ‘Why Am I Alive Now’, taking the apocalyptic imagery of the classic spiritual ‘Sinnerman’ and bringing it to our immediate reality.

It is deeply personal, too. The legendary gay liberation activist Marsha P. Johnson, a longstanding inspiration for Anohni and the person her band is named after, adorns the record’s cover, and on its inside artwork is Anohni’s longtime friend and collaborator Dr. Julia Yasuda, who died in 2018. ‘Sliver Of Ice’ is inspired directly by her final conversations with another friend, Lou Reed, shortly before his death. For all its brushes with the tumult of modern existence, it’s a sense of deep intimacy from which the record draws its depth.

It should come as no surprise that Anohni has cited Marvin Gaye’s ‘What’s Going On’ as one of the guiding lights for this project. As well as sonic touchpoints – there’s much of Gaye in the record’s smooth melodic momentum – both are proof that music that is warm, inviting and tender can still be vital and engaged; that beauty, hope, rage, disillusion, dejection, sorrow and joy can not only co-exist, but thrive in one another’s company.