Darning Woman

by Coope,Anastasia

Overview

On her debut full-length Darning Woman, avant-garde singer/songwriter Anastasia Coope wanders through an insular soundworld that's eerie and ungrounded but also full of slippery beauty. Many of Coope's songs are made up of minimal elements but employ layer upon layer of overdubbed vocals, her one voice multiplied into a creaky chorus of angels and demons trying to find the same tune. On opening track "He Is on His Way Home, We Don't Live Together," this swirl of voices hangs on a haunted piano melody before spiraling into chaos and unexpected blurts of electric guitar and freeform percussion. "Women's Role in War" is brief, with walls of vocals clinging to what sounds like a banjo loop, and "Woke Up and No Feet" is a menacing kind of folk song, mostly made of yelps and wails that criss-cross each other. At just over 21 minutes long, the entire nine-song album is short and succinct, wasting none of its energy on filler. In Coope's weird world, a one-minute-and-40-second song like "Sorghum" -- with no easily defined structure or hooks -- is what passes for pop. There are lots of precursors to the sound Coope spins on Darning Woman: Nico's icy drawling, Yoko Ono, unhinged crooners like Annette Peacock or Brigitte Fontaine, or the earliest waves of freak folk when Animal Collective and Devendra Banhart were making demonic campfire songs. Coope touches on all these reference points without sounding too much like any of them. Darning Woman is at its most captivating when it doesn't even sound much like music at all, but more like the grinding gears of an overactive brain processing confusion and bliss. ~ Fred Thomas

Product Details

Release Date:	05/31/2024
Label:	Jagjaguwar
UPC:	0656605245638
Rank:	54610

Tracks

1. He Is On His Way Home, We Don't Live Togethe
2. Women's Role in War
3. What Doesn't Work What Does
4. Darning Woman
5. Sounds of a Giddy Woman
6. Woke Up and No Feet
7. Sorghum
8. Newbin Time
9. Return to Room

Album Credits

Performance Credits

Anastasia Coope   Primary Artist