ALBUM REVIEW: Anthony Family – ‘Live From An Ordinary Place’

There are two tracks on Live From An Ordinary Place that are worth highlighting before speaking on the album as a whole. The first is (thirtyseven), a voicemail from Anthony Anzaldo’s mother wishing him a happy birthday, while referring to herself as his “mommy” and his “birth-giver”, and circling the drain of goo-goo-eyed cringe so much that if any normal person’s parent spoke to them like this, they’d be tempted to cut them off entirely. The other is Nothing Something Everything Onemorething, whose entire lyrical sheet is its title repeated a couple of times over, and yet, according to Anzaldo, “the song with the least amount of words is the one with the most complex and all encompassing point of view”.

The reason that these are worth bringing up in isolation is because they’re both perfect little melds of Live From An Ordinary Place’s utterly incapacitating faults. Here’s an album that believes and hopes against hope that it’s more than a mere side-project, with nothing to show for it outside of oblique pseudo-‘depth’. ‘Pretentious’, too, is an apt descriptor, for as overused as the term has become. It’s not like it wouldn’t fit for Anzaldo’s perceived role of sophistipop romantic versus darkwave stentor, convinced of a greatness without the joy or warmth to make it feel welcoming. Truly, the vainest of vanity projects.

The air of self-importance hangs low, heavy and staid across this album. It’s nearly all traceable back to Anzaldo himself, a proud music anorak in both his work with Ceremony who’ve dabbled in everything from shoegaze and post-punk to powerviolence, and a record collector with bounds far exceeding those. He cites Prince as a personal hero (“I think about him every day in my life,” Anzaldo has said), and that goes a loooong way in tying up a prescriptively owed sense of worth. The difference is that Prince’s genius manifested through a generational populism; under the Anthony Family moniker, Anzaldo’s is confined to his own head.

What’s more disappointing about that is how Live From An Ordinary Place starts with a fairly promising swing. From its very standing as a seven-and-a-half-minute opener, Soulless tips the scales heavily in favour of Anzaldo’s boundless auteurship, but its gentleness and slight unearthiness—and a pretty great extended guitar solo for the last couple of minutes—work well enough to fill the space. Afterwards, 101 North steps up considerably, pitched between ‘80s pop and a Tame Impala-esque haze where its spiral is nailed on.

A lot of the time, though, Live From An Ordinary Place doesn’t allow more than a seed of a good idea to take form. It wants to be more than that, clearly, though any awareness of how high Anzaldo’s limitations are stacked is conveniently brushed off. For one, he’s just not a very engaging frontman. At his best, a semi-stylish synthpop character is formed, breathy and gossamer in a performance that sometimes toys with androgyny (or its fringes, at the very least). At worst, the titular line of Souless is a stiff, awkwardly-wedged clump that threatens to derail an otherwise-okay chorus, and the nasal register panted out at the end of Sex In The Car is entirely unappealing.

But because the music is a bit more hardscrabble and ‘deconstructed’ (i.e. singular ideas that overwhelm most of what’s around them, often in a short, confined runtime), it’s meant to be bold and brilliant. Not so, of course, though that’s relatively easy to get a bead on. It’s not like any of these songs even remotely leave a positive taste, the thing that synthpop and new wave is practically built for the purpose of. Hell, Your Dress On Me doesn’t get the chance to when it’s chopped down to this wafer-thin, 80-second indie-pop fragment. At least it sounds pleasant, unlike the numbing slog of Overmorrow weighed down by its turgid pace, cheap, unstable (and unchanging) drum machine, and the pitch-shifted shrieks midway through to shatter any remaining mood. It’s an ugly piece of music, rationalised by another cryptic musing from Anzaldo, “If you feel like what’s ahead of you doesn’t serve you, hopefully you’re wrong.”

That, more than anything, is what destroys Live From An Ordinary Place. It’s borderline smug in how it carries itself, and so convinced of its masterpiece status for reasons that are rarely even present on the album itself. Anzaldo’s additional philosophising isn’t any sort of boon, bear in mind, though if you’re so inclined to believe that this is some experiential journey from them being there, more power to you. That isn’t the impression that shabby, inert, half-formed synthpop gives off on its own, though. Ultimately, that’s the final nail in this coffin; it’s just the insufferability of anything and everything around it that drives it deeper.

For fans of: Perfume Genius, Blood Orange, Echo & The Bunnymen

‘Live From An Ordinary Place’ by Anthony Family is out now on Pure Noise Records.

Words by Luke Nuttall