There are voices that touch you. And then, there are voices that touch you. Often enough, it’s easy to tell what makes you fall for a voice: It might sound especially melancholic, aggressive, or lascivious. However, sometimes, there is only a hint of something intangible, an emotion that can’t be specified. Annika Henderson has a voice like that. Most recently, this voice was to be heard in 2013, when it filled an EP on Stones Throw by the name of »Anika«. With the help of her voice, she knocked down compositions of bony instrumentals and hijacked them into a parallel world. The sound of her new band, Exploded View, is a completely different one, the basic data of which go as follows: Annika Henderson meets three musicians in Mexico by chance (Martin Thulin, Hugo Quezada and Amon Melgarejo) and gets along with them straight away – personally and musically. In the end, they record a full album together in an improvised session: Exploded View. Both, band name and album title stand for the exploding masses of graphic images displaying tragedies, catastrophes, blood and thunder – and the way we view these things. Hence, the lyrics are highly politically charged, which is hard to notice because you’re so drawn in by: Anika’s voice. It’s a voice you might dream of when drifting between sleeping and being awake. A voice that’s hard to imagine talking about mundanities. An uncanny voice that seems far away, not real. It puts its cold coat over the instrumentals – rumbling drums, a snappy bass, undercooled synthesizers. Yes, please? If need be: impro-post-punk-no-wave-cold-wave. Even noise-y here and there, distorted guitars, there’s dinging and donging and things are somersaulting. The record is at its best when the instrumentals harmonize, when they have the right kind of space for Anika’s voice to blow through in order to take the track to another level. No one knows where exactly that level might be – it’s all too strange, really. But it’s a high one, that’s the first thing you’ll notice
Boris & Uniform
Bright New Disease
Sacred Bones