- Label: 'Last Night From Glasgow'
- Genre: 'Pop'
- Release Date: '7.8.26.'
Our Rating:
As We Once Were is the third album by Welsh artist The Anchoress who is Anna Marie Davies who recorded the album with help from Hannah Peel, Gwenno, James Dean Bradfield and Eaves Wilder. The album was recorded at Black Lodge Studios, Mixed by Dave Eringa and Mikko Gordon and Mastered by Jon Astley.
The album opens with Du Temps Perdu (Introduction) that takes the classical theme and adds some spoken word samples, that play backwards over it. Throw Over Your Man is much more full on, with it's plea for more female empowerment, she wants to make clear her head is full of you, while you need to dump your man, so she can love you like a woman can, I certainly hope Suzie gives in and has that torrid affair with The Anchoress, she won't regret it, luxuriating in James Dean Bradfield's guitar playing and backing vocals, imploring her to live the Bloomsbury set lifestyle.
I Had A Baby Not A Lobotomy (FT Gwenno) is taking aim at anyone who treats new mums as incapable of coherent conversation, or resuming their previous lifestyles, the atmospheric backing for all the issues she had with the treatment of new mums, her scorn for anyone who dares describe her, or any other woman as just an incubator on legs, if you are not horrified that anyone would use that phrase you should not buy this album.
Damsels was the graffiti seen on a window and the thoughts it provoked, the synths build around these thoughts, the questions of what constitutes fair play these days. As We Once Were opens with a recording of her grandmother that was discovered, before the sylph like reflections on her gran unfolds to crystalline gossamer synth pop imbued with a sense of longing for days of yore.
Happiness Don't Show Up Like It Should (Prologue) has sparse piano and atmospheric synths for her to repeat the title gently over. All I Really Want Is Peace is not only a plea for a life without personal conflict, while this is a plea for redemption and forgiveness once all the fighting is over. Stop The World brings children's voices into the spacey atmospherics before The Anchoress asks if she could live like it's the old days, a thought more and more of us seem to be having in the last few years, a return to saner simpler times.
Du Temps Perdu Reprise is played gently and reflectively. What You Did is full of pain and yearning for those things you did that she can’t say out loud, never to be uttered secrets that destroy from within, those dark moments you never want to relive or mention again, no matter how they eat at your inner core.
All Fall Down reminds me of Telefis' recordings using Cathal Coughlan's Aunts, while the slow hushed vocals ask more disturbing questions, while they All Fall Down taking another drink, another pill anything to mask the pain and sorrow she feels. The synth conjures up deep chasms she needs to be able to repair and bring back together.
Hand To The Tide has a rather eastern flavour along with the pots being used to add a percussive sound or too, the reflections on what has led to her insomnia, that pain that won't dissipate. She pleads for you not to resist the pull of her charms, listening to this album it would be very difficult to resist her.
She Knows Her Place opens with a short Welsh phrase, before this super sparse reflection on a woman who has been put upon enough that She Knows Her Place doing the bidding of her master, while hoping to be whisked away to a freer life, where she will be appreciated for who she is and not just and adornment for some man. The questions of who she could have been if she wasn't being controlled so totally.
When the voice over arrives mansplaining that you might be depressed after giving birth, it adds to the constant theme of the album, the need for female emancipation from all controlling men, let's all work to bring down the patriarchy. The album closes with Happiness (Epilogue) a slow piano and synth piece with more of the ancient recordings telling us there is so much to look forward too.
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