{"id":197,"date":"2008-06-24T22:00:50","date_gmt":"2008-06-24T10:00:50","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thunderguy.com\/bennett\/?p=197"},"modified":"2008-06-24T22:00:50","modified_gmt":"2008-06-24T10:00:50","slug":"the-lake-anna-coddington","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/2008\/06\/24\/the-lake-anna-coddington\/","title":{"rendered":"The Lake — Anna Coddington"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>Here’s a set of simple, affecting songs, beautifully sung and sympathetically arranged. The overall theme is Love Gone Wrong, the traditional singer-songwriter preoccupation. But Anna Coddington turns it into something that sounds great — “beauty exploding from despair”, to use one of her own lines.<\/p>\n

I was looking forward to buying this CD, since I enjoyed Anna Coddington’s performance<\/a> a few months ago. Even though it’s been quite a long time since then, I still remember quite a few of the songs. The songs worked really well live, with Anna accompanying herself on guitar; the fuller production on the album adds another dimension without ever overwhelming the basic voice and guitar structure.<\/p>\n

Lots of highlights for me. Hold You Here<\/em> and Sweet Sweet Nothings<\/em> are both melodic and easy (but not too easy) to listen to. The jaunty Sentences<\/em> opens with what could be a nice summary of the album:<\/p>\n

I know it for sure
\nI think too much
\nAbout this guitar
\nAnd my feelings and such<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

T-Shirt<\/em> is a darker song. The sound reminds me of the Australian power-pop band Clouds, one of my favourite groups; the guitar has a very slightly edgier sound, at least during the verses. The song starts with the beautifully evocative lines “I blew my brains out \/ Butterflies came out”. This reminded me of the title track from Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral<\/em>: “Everything’s blue in this world \/ The deepest shade of mushroom blue \/ All fuzzy \/ Spilling out of my head.” The NIN track is of course far more depressing, but I still like the thought that I might be the first person ever to compare Anna Coddington to Nine Inch Nails.<\/p>\n

In contrast, The Long Way Home<\/em> features just voice and guitar; it took me back to that solo performance. Ah, the memories. Good times, good times.<\/p>\n

Apparently Anna hangs out with a bunch of other Kiwi singer-songwriter women like Anika Moa and Bic Runga. You can hear this on the album — I never noticed it live, but on The Lake I can hear a few Bic Runga-like vocal stylings. Anna’s enunciation is not quite as mannered as Bic’s though. That’s a good thing. Still, her voice is sweet enough to confuse one local newspaper reviewer, who couldn’t reconcile Anna’s voice with her day job as a karate instructor. That was one weird piece of music criticism — on the strength of this album, Anna’s clearly nothing less than a renaissance woman.<\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a set of simple, affecting songs, beautifully sung and sympathetically arranged. The overall theme is Love Gone Wrong, the traditional singer-songwriter preoccupation. But Anna Coddington turns it into something that sounds great — “beauty exploding from despair”, to use … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[8,7,19],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-review","tag-cds","tag-music","tag-new-zealand"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thunderguy.com\/bennett\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}