Leith Theatre
Four stars
When Anna Calvi incants
a whispered ‘No, don’t you stop me’ mantra on Wish, from Hunter, her third,
Mercury Music Prize nominated album, the hush that greets it as she points her
finger at the audience following an epic guitar wig-out suggests no-one in the
room would dare.
Calvi’s first return to
Edinburgh International Festival since 2015 saw her sashay onstage already
twanging at her guitar on a rawer and less dreamy take on Hunter’s title track.
Black-clad, Medusa-haired and accompanied by the martial engine room of drummer
Alex Thomas and multi-instrumentalist Mally Harpaz, Calvi’s mix of primal
keening and guitar slashes rooted in 1950s juke-box melodrama came alive with a
gender-hopping psycho-sexual ferocity. The intensity of the work may point to
something transcendent, but she remains in total control.
Stuttering Bo Diddleyesque
guitar patterns give way to the woozy loveliness of the David Hockney inspired Swimming
Pool. This in turn snakes its way towards the rolling thunder of Desire, before
Don’t Beat the Girl out of My Boy sees Calvi on her knees, wrestling her guitar
into noisy submission before she’s bathed in a red triangle of light for Alpha.
Calvi’s other-worldly operatics
resemble a wide-screen fusion of John Barry and Ennio Morricone possessed by the
mercurial spirit of Billy MacKenzie and infused with the space-age analog of
Joe Meek. In this respect, Calvi sounds like she’d be as at ease performing
Frankie Laine’s version of Ghost Riders in the Sky as she would be doing Ghost
Rider by Suicide.
The latter closes the
show following a solo take on Eden, the accompanying pin-drop hush only broken
by the visceral flamenco of another Laine song, Jezebel, which Calvi released
as her first single almost a decade ago. Harpaz and Thomas join her for Ghost
Rider, an exercise in rock and roll primitivism that got its creators bottled
off stage forty-odd years ago, but which Calvi makes her own. As she raises her
guitar above her head like a trophy, it looks like victory.
The Herald, August 12th 2019
ends
Comments