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Annie Anxiety: Soul Possession LP (Corpus Christi, 1984)
Despite spending several decades immersed in punk’s history, I’ll never stop being humbled by how much I don’t know. Case in point: Annie Anxiety. I was familiar with Annie Anxiety’s 1981 single on Crass Records, “Barbed Wire Halo.” I have a habit of picking up any reasonably priced Crass Records single I come across, knowing full well that a lot of them don’t fit the anarcho punk mold (insofar as there is an anarcho punk mold). “Barbed Wire Halo” is one of those outliers, not quite as out there as the poet Andy T’s single, but not really a toe-tapper either, its music composed mostly of manipulated radio recordings and the vocals, while interesting and expressive, are not really something you hum to yourself in the shower.
I know I’ve seen the cover of Annie Anxiety’s Soul Possession album before—probably when Dais Records reissued the album in 2017—but I’d never listened to it until I came across this original pressing. Looking over the jacket before I put the record on, I noticed Soul Possession’s producer is Adrian Sherwood. While Sherwood’s resume is a mile long, I know him mostly as the proprietor of the On-U Sound label and a key figure in propagating dub reggae’s influence in the post-punk underground. I have a ton of Sherwood-produced records in my collection, including groups like Creation Rebel, African Head Charge, and New Age Steppers for which he seemed to be a driving creative force, but he also has credits on Depeche Mode, Primal Scream, and Sinéad O’Connor records, and had a hand in producing Slates, perhaps my favorite record by my favorite band, the Fall.
As for Soul Possession, it’s exactly the mash-up of Crass Records and On-U Sound I never knew I wanted. Penny Rimbaud from Crass provides drums, Derek Birkett from Flux of Pink Indians plays bass, Gee Vaucher contributes backing vocals, and Eve Libertine provides the striking cover design. Sherwood produces and brings along his multi-instrumentalist On-U Sound partner Kishiko Yamamoto, and the first track, “Closet Love,” sounds like the perfect combination of all those elements. Like Annie Anxiety’s earlier single, it sounds fragmented and choppy, but as in dub reggae, the rhythm section is the glue that holds the composition together and makes it feel like a song. That, and Annie’s vocals are clearer and more present in the mix, revealing warm, dreamy vocal lines that you absolutely could sing in the shower.
One criticism I have of some of the other Sherwood-helmed records in my collection is that they can feel unsatisfyingly circular. Sometimes songs don’t have the sense of development that makes them build toward a satisfying conclusion; instead, the music seems to cycle through iterations of a particular idea, stopping unceremoniously when they’ve wrung the idea dry. I don’t get that feeling from Soul Possession, though. Maybe it’s because each song sounds so different from the last. While “Closet Love” isn’t miles away from something you’d hear on a Siouxsie and the Banshees album, several others have a bluesy, swampy vibe that makes me think of the Gun Club and the Birthday Party. But the album never feels rootsy; the production is determinedly futuristic.
Researching Annie Anxiety, I learned, much to my surprise, that she is American, having performed at Max’s Kansas City with a group called Annie and the Asexuals when she was only sixteen. On a visit to the UK, she ended up at Dial House where she connected with Penny Rimbaud from Crass and then Sherwood. Annie’s involvement with the UK avant garde underground didn’t end with Crass and Adrian Sherwood, either, as her later credits include touchstones like Nurse with Wound, Current 93, Coil, and many others. I need to know more about her contributions to these recordings. Certainly she has a keen ear for identifying forward-thinking collaborators.
In 1987, three years after Soul Possession, Annie released another solo album called Jackamo, originally slated to come out on On-U sound, but ultimately appearing on One Little Indian instead. After that, she changed her stage name to Little Annie, releasing a string of singles and an album (the latter in 1992) and amassing a longer list of credits. I’ll be interested to hear where those records go, as Soul Possession’s combination of avant-garde textures and primal performance has really tickled my fancy lately.