Annie Gardiner is a musical chameleon having released albums under a few guises such as the ambient Digital Leaves and Yamaha PSR-90-driven love letter to club culture on Jungian Stomp. But my introduction to her music started with the Bloodletting album which I bought when she supported Run Logan Run at Strange Brew in Bristol. Sleeping Dogs is her second solo album under her own name and, once again, the emotive nature of her dark folk is captivating and replete with the poetry of storytelling and allusion.
“Once I saw her drown, harbour side of town. Tried to call out.”
From ‘Sleeping Dogs’.
“Puddle pool pin prick. Head locked in bricks. Heart bursting spit. Sudden and thick.”
From ‘Things I Didn’t Know Were There’.
The title track opens the album, and it is pure Ennio Morricone with rolling acoustic guitar, low menacing rasps of bowed double bass and some glorious whistling. I can picture the stranger walking into town and stopping to get the lay if the land: the good and the bad look on, the saloon door creaks, tumbleweed blows by. It’s a bold opening, setting out a cinematic stall that serves the album well. However. this was not an easy project to bring to life and Gardiner says the album was “the hardest thing I’ve made. I gave up several times but pushed on. I tried to make it different, it wouldn’t go. I wrote 70 songs, it wanted 8.”
The string arrangements on the album are beautiful, complex, sometimes melancholy and always intoxicating. Regular collaborator Jo Kelly on double bass is joined by Drew Morgan on cello, Rebecca Shelley Woodman on Violin, and Llyr Adeline and their homemade instrument, ‘The Log Lady’.
Towards the end of the album, we get two songs that are dark twins: the “scratch at old wounds” of ‘The Stitch That No One Saw’ and held breath of closing track ‘Cold Dawn’. They are powerful in their restrained arrangements as they create a landscape of aching strings, pauses, and moments of brooding majesty allowing Gardiner’s emotive voice to move from breathy near-whisper to soaring pleas. These two songs evoke stasis; contemplative, totally engrossing, and very moving.
It’s probably true to say that emotionally most people fear the darkness that might envelop us and we must light both real, and metaphorical, fires to keep it at a distance. The work that Gardiner has put in to fight the desire to give up on the album is admirable, and you feel all of that effort in these songs. Bloodletting was a fantastic debut that I return to again and again, but Sleeping Dogs feels like Annie Gardiner has gone subterranean deep to mine these precious songs from ancient caves and bring them into the light. These are stories in search of a fire to tell them by.
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Review by Paul F Cook
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