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Laurie Anderson: Homeland

 A l b u m   D e t a i l s


Label: Nonesuch / Elektra Records
Released: 2010.06.22
Time:
 66:15
Category: Pop/Rock
Producer(s): Laurie Anderson, Lou Reed and Roma Baran
Rating: ********.. (8/10)
Media type: CD
Web address: www.laurieanderson.com
Appears with:
Purchase date: 2012
Price in €: 16,99





 S o n g s ,   T r a c k s


[1] Transitory Life (L.Anderson) - 6:52
[2] My Right Eye (L.Anderson) - 5:01
[3] Thinking of You (L.Anderson) - 4:12
[4] Strange Perfumes (L.Anderson) - 4:46
[5] Only an Expert (L.Anderson) - 7:26
[6] Falling (L.Anderson) - 3:19
[7] Another Day in America (L.Anderson) - 11:24
[8] Bodies in Motion (L.Anderson) - 7:10
[9] Dark Time in the Revolution (L.Anderson) - 5:19
[10] The Lake (L.Anderson) - 5:39
[11] The Beginning of Memory (L.Anderson) - 2:45
[12] Flow (L.Anderson) - 2:15

 A r t i s t s ,   P e r s o n n e l


Laurie Anderson – Vocals, Keyboards, Percussion, Violin on [3, 7, 12], Radio on [9], Producer, Engineer

Peter Scherer – Keyboards
Rob Burger – Keyboards on [2-5, 8, 9], Orchestron on [2-3, 8], Accordion on [3, 4, 9, 10], Marxophone on [4]
Eyvind Kang – Viola
Tuvan Group Chirgilchin – Vocals on [1, 11], Igil on [1]
Lou Reed – Additional Percussion on [2], Guitar on [5]
Antony Hegarty – Vocals on [4], Background Vocals on [7]
Shahzad Ismaily – Percussion on [4]
Kieran Hebden – Keyboards on [5]
Omar Hakim – Drums on [5]
Skúli Sverrisson – Bass on [7, 9], Guitar on [8]
Ben Witman – Percussion And Drums on [7]
John Zorn – Alto Saxophone on [8, 11]
Lolabelle – Piano on [8]
Joey Baron – Drums on [9]
Mario Mcnulty – Percussion on [11]

Lou Reed - Producer
Roma Baran - Producer
Pat Dillett - Engineer
Mario Mcnulty - Engineer, Mixing
Marc Urselli - Engineer
Mixed By Mario Mcnulty
Scott Hull - Mastering

 C o m m e n t s ,   N o t e s


Homeland is an album by Laurie Anderson. It is her first album of new material since 2001's Life on a String. The record was produced by Anderson, Lou Reed and Roma Baran. Anderson has been touring the project since late 2007, and the album was slated for release since as early as 2008. Because the project kept changing in form, the release was pushed back several times. The final release was a two-disc set consisting of a CD of music and a DVD. The song "Only an Expert" was released as a 12" vinyl single on May 18, 2010. A song titled "Pictures and Things" was the single's B-side.



Nina Power, previewing the album in The Wire magazine, claimed that Homeland "reminds us why Anderson, now in her sixties, is the (modulated) voice of America's conscience."



Margaret Wappler of The Los Angeles Times wrote of the album, "'Homeland' isn't so much an album as it is a poetic capturing of the still moments of a restless mind".



The perfect soundtrack for a journey into America’s night.

Laurie Anderson’s O Superman, her first, most famous and, indeed, only hit, was released in 1981, when Reagan had just swept to power and the American Empire was reaching something like its zenith, with the Cold War entering its final phases. Twenty-nine years later, and on Homeland Anderson seems fairly certain she’s bearing witness to that crumbing, deluded and debt-ridden Empire’s end.

That may sound a somewhat portentous subject, but in fact Anderson’s whimsical sense of humour remains a constant, at times a little wearingly so. Then again, if you are essentially releasing an album about the credit crunch, it’s probably best to try and sneak some chuckles in there. Certainly Homeland’s catchiest track, the chattering techno pop of Only an Expert, succeeds as a brilliantly vicious satire of the hollowing out of the American Dream, managing to find a through thread between the Iraq War, the bail out of the US banks and the empty wisdom of Oprah Winfrey.

However, the album really does come into its own when Anderson allows herself to hit a more sombre note. Certainly the latter portions of the 11-and-a-half minute, pitch-shifted tour de force Another Day in America are extraordinary. Over a wraithlike keyboard figure, wreathed in wordless backing wails (courtesy of Antony Hegarty), ambient hiss, dissonant strings and trembles of keyboard she bids farewell to the junk and the glory of the 20th century, questioning “how do we begin again?”, intoning, yearning, that “the reason I really love the stars, is that we cannot hurt them”, before concluding, ominously: “but we are reaching for them”.

To some extent Only an Expert and Another Day in America dominate Homeland to the point of slightly unbalancing it, the first catchy and pugnacious, the other epic and quotable. Yet the rest of the tracks don’t really try and compete: elsewhere Homeland offers a more textural journey, populated by squalls of free jazz, melancholic knots of electronica, uncomfortable pauses and low, distorted vocals. There are still witticisms aplenty, but the overall effect is an air of creeping dread, the perfect soundtrack for a journey into America’s night.

Andrzej Lukowski - 2010-06-18
 BBC Review


The State of the United States, in a Chamber-Rock Stew

From the beginning of her career Laurie Anderson has cast an analytical eye over American culture and politics and turned her observations into cutting musical works that straddle the line between art song and stand-up comedy. Her most durable essay on the subject is the 1983 multimedia work “United States I-IV,” a work that came to mind often during her performance of her newest piece, “Homeland,” at Zankel Hall on Wednesday evening.

“Homeland” is essentially a 100-minute update, a new volume to put alongside “United States” (as will be physically possible when Nonesuch releases the work on CD.) Ms. Anderson performs in her signature style: alternately singing and speaking, sometimes with electronic processing on her voice (making her sound like a man, for example, or giving her voice a choral halo), and playing the electric violin and keyboards. Her spare ensemble is a hybrid chamber group and rock band, with Peter Scherer, a keyboardist; Skuli Sverrisson, a bass guitarist; and Okkyung Lee, a cellist.

“Homeland” deals partly with the loss of freedom in a security state and partly with the Iraq war and contemporary war in general. Ms. Anderson evokes images of a young woman with a “baby face” enlisting in the United States Army as a way to pay for her education, and young Palestinians wearing suicide vests, observing that war today is “a kid’s war,” another “children’s crusade,” with no restrictions: “anyone can join.”

A song with echoes of a 1950s ballad style, updated by way of early, parodistic Frank Zappa and a dash of electronica, examines a sort of Rumsfeldian cynicism, represented by the assertion that our problems are so complex that only experts can deal with them. Ms. Anderson transforms that idea into a close relative: that problems are only problems when experts say they are. Torture? No problem. Invading a country and causing chaos and civil war? No problem. Experts, she tells us, are people who carry malpractice insurance because their solutions often become the problem.

But the work isn’t all war protest. Ms. Anderson also looks at the vacuity of the consumer culture, skewered here in a song that describes billboards with underwear advertisements, with “huge people in their underwear, their heads two stories high.” They are, she intones, “The Underwear Gods.” Another song tackles empty relationships: “I pretend that you love me, you pretend that you care.”

Musically “Homeland” explores few places Ms. Anderson hasn’t visited before. All the songs are slow, and although a few offer arresting electronic drum patterns, most roll out an ambient haze on which Ms. Anderson projects her verbal snapshots.

The occasional neo-Romantic violin and cello duets between Ms. Anderson and Ms. Lee were highlights, moments when Ms. Anderson set aside comment and turned, however briefly, to pure composition. But pure composition isn’t really what she does, or what her audience wants from her. Here it was an attractive bonus.

ALLAN KOZINN - New York Times
 March 28, 2008


Laurie Anderson's 40-year career bucks classification, incorporating performance art, music, spoken word, video, and more. To mention John Zorn, Lou Reed, and Philip Glass only glosses her collaborations with the American avant-garde. She's also crossed over in interesting and unexpected ways, whether voicing a singing tot in The Rugrats Movie, or hitting #2 on the 1981 UK Singles Chart with "O Superman (For Massenet)", a doomsday anthem combining the vocoder with an aria from Le Cid. That angelic, robotic voice is often reprised on Homeland, her first new album in a decade, which fans will welcome as an heir to her definitive performance piece, United States. It's also a perfect starting point; an exquisite state-of-the-union dispatch as only Anderson, America's darkly comic conscience, can provide.

A songful yet distressed Neo-Romantic mode anchors forays into techno, jazz, drone, and minimal electronics. Top-notch guests like Zorn, Antony, and Kieran Hebden add their unique perspectives to Anderson's probing keyboards and violins. The music is spacious, mercurial, and thoroughly conceived. Anderson's vocals hover between speech and song, polemics and poetry, apocalyptic and redemptive fervors. And that's as far as generalizations will go. Homeland teems with the same variety and sprit as the U.S. itself.

These songs have been developing live for years, so naturally, Iraq and Wall Street loom large. The persistence of those quandaries makes the material feel timely, even oracular, a quality for which Anderson is known. "O Superman" gained fresh attention after 9-11 for its images of American planes drawing ominously nearer. (On a lighter note, its vocals predicted everything from Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" to the ongoing Auto-Tune craze.) She's still broadcasting from the day after tomorrow. The organic house track "Only an Expert" schematically details the hubris of authorities who consolidate power by creating problems only they can solve. Had the album been delayed a little longer, a verse about the BP oil leak would have fit perfectly alongside the global warming controversy and the banking bailout.

"Only an Expert" makes a pervasive, subtle theme momentarily explicit: How shared illusions about security and plenitude perpetuate a predictable cycle of cultural, environmental, and existential crises. But this threatens to make the album sound punitive, when somehow, Anderson's wrath feels compassionate. As "Falling" would have it, "Americans, unrooted, blow with the wind/ But they feel the truth if it touches them." It's confrontational and beautiful, the grim tidings leavened with empathetic portraiture. "Transitory Life" is haunting and cunningly crafted. When Anderson sings that her dead grandmother "made herself a bed inside my ear/ Every night I hear," the Tuvan throat singer from the song's intro reappears, the formless cries suddenly given a narrative role.

But the epic "Another Day in America" is the album's huge, dark heart. Anderson's voice is pitched down and slowed-- she becomes her character on the cover, a slapstick figure of male authority-- over lingering strings and keyboards. The oration is a vortex of visionary proclamations, pointed fables, downbeat jokes. It makes palpable not only all the pathos and superstition of the American psyche, but the weight of time passing away-- another diminishing resource. Every malfunction of the status quo, Anderson implies, is a chance to start over, instead of rushing to rebuild what always breaks down. Her pessimism might not be comforting, but as oil continues to poison the Gulf of Mexico, it feels awfully prescient.

Brian Howe - Pitchfork Media
June 21, 2010



'America is a good place for stories,' Laurie Anderson told London's The Guardian right before she brought 'Homeland,' her self described 'concert poem,' to English stages. 'Homeland' contains some of Anderson's most incisive work, -- darkly humorous, starkly emotional, and, at times, movingly tender. Her stories are once again about these United States of America, the sprawling subject that first brought her acclaim more than 25 years ago with her eight-hour Reagan era phantasmagoria, 'United States, Parts I - IV.'
'Homeland' is a distilled, up-to-the-minute portrait of our agitated nation, its politics, its economics, its delusions and its dreams. Her tone is less outraged than elegiac, mourning for lives lost, ideals misplaced. The music is dramatically stripped down to a handful of players, centered around Anderson's haunting violin and voice, frequent Bill Frisell band-mate Eyvind Kang's viola and Peter Scherer's keyboards. The arrangements are embellished with such touches as the siren-like vocals of Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), thumping keyboards from Keiran Hebden (of Four Tet), and, on the brilliant, wickedly funny 'Only An Expert,' a gnarly guitar turn from Anderson's husband and co-producer Lou Reed.

'Homeland,' long awaited in recorded form, has evolved over more than two years of touring as Anderson developed the songs in front of concertgoers around the world, from downtown clubs in Manhattan to an amphitheatre in Athens, Greece. In Artforum, Anderson summarized the songs as 'one-third politics, one-third pure music, and one-third strange dreams.' The work was shaped more by humanity than by technology; Anderson built an intimate rapport with her audience during a show that featured a shifting set-list of new material and relied on words and music far more than visual and theatrical effects. That intimacy is just as palpable in the songs that evolved to make up her new album.. The Guardian said ''Homeland' represents some of the most purely beautiful music she has ever made.' In the States, Daily Variety declared, 'The music that accompanies the vignettes and songs is some of the loveliest that Anderson has ever written ...Like the narratives it accompanies, the sound's grave but not without wit; measured and dispassionate, but not without heart.'

On the road, 'Homeland' drew acclaim and attracted controversy for its political content. But Anderson is not merely criticizing or complaining; on tracks like the stunning 11-minute album centerpiece, 'Another Day In America,' Anderson is really singing for our survival, retelling the stories of our present state in the most forthright material of her career. It can be harrowing but it can be hopeful, and it is as riveting as anything Anderson has produced since the groundbreaking 'Big Science' in 1982. As Variety concluded, ''Homeland' reinforces Anderson's place as the best interpreter of our troubled times.'

Amazon.com



We haven't heard from Laurie Anderson in eight years -- since her Live at Town Hall NYC recording, cut two weeks after September 11, 2001 -- but that doesn't mean she hasn't been busy. Homeland began as a series of ideas recorded on the road in which she simply sang songs and told various stories about America. Some of them ended up as a concert poem about America that was a logical extension of her United States I-IV project -- and a non-didactic indictment of the Bush administration. The live recordings were combined with basic studio tracks, ending in 25 songs. She eventually ended up with the daunting task of sorting through, editing, and engineering a million audio files. Husband Lou Reed lent fresh ears when they were most needed; he is listed as a co-producer, as is longtime associate Roma Baran. Homeland features appearances from a stellar cast including Tuvan throat singers and igil players of Chirgilchin along with a number of experimental jazz and rock players, including Rob Burger, Omar Hakim, Reed, John Zorn, Kieran Hebden, Shahzad Ismaily, Eyvind Kang, Joey Baron, Peter Scherer, Skuli Sverrisson, Ben Wittman, and Antony Hegarty. Its songs -- whether spoken or sung -- are profoundly musical rather than simply conceptual. They ask questions about what it means to be an American in the 21st century, philosophically and personally, by way of references as diverse as Thomas Paine, Søren Kierkegaard, Aristophanes, and Oprah Winfrey -- and Anderson's wonderful sense of irony. While there isn't a single cut in this dozen that doesn't bear repeated listening, certain ones stand out. The trilogy that begins with "My Right Eye" and continues through "Thinking of You" and "Strange Perfumes" consists of nocturnal, low-key songs haunted by the beauty of Anderson's violin and voice with help from various singers, Kang's viola, Scherer's keyboards, and Burger's various instruments, including accordion. Hegarty assists on the last of these, lending it an ethereal quality. All are lyrical and haunting. "Only an Expert," driven by Hebden's keyboards and Reed's distorted guitar, is a scathing indictment of the rise of focus groups and the nebulous talking heads on television who analyze everything about modern life. The album's true hinge piece, "Another Day in America," employs Anderson's longtime male alter ego Fenway Bergamot. Zorn's bleating alto saxophone adds weight, dimension, and shock value to the lovely "Bodies in Motion." He also appears on "The Beginning of Memory," a song that relates the narrative allegory of a play from Aristophanes. Homeland is literally the most accessible Anderson recording since 1982's Big Science and easily stands among her masterworks.

Thom Jurek - All Music Guide

 

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