Damn, I thought this was going to be a late contender for my album of the year at one point. I’d only heard ‘Hot Family‘, which was kind of like a controversial but catchy cross between Frank Black‘s goofier solo stuff and Big Thief. And then I played the first track on Botanical Garden, ‘170‘, which is full on Pixies meets Tom Tom Club by way of Laurie Anderson. I absolutely love those two tracks!
I know, I know, now I’ve said that, you’re expecting me to say something like “It all goes downhill from there” aren’t you? Well, I wouldn’t quite go that far, but sadly the record never quite reaches those heights again. It’s still a good record, just perhaps not quite the instant classic I had anticipated.
The title track transports me right back to the late 1980s and bands like The Darling Buds, and, for some reason, The Sugarcubes, though I can’t quite put my finger on why. It’s a jaunty, jangle-pop tune that is easily palatable and simply good fun.
Things are brought down a notch for ‘B.M.G. Academy‘, in which Anna continuously laments that “He’s got tickets for the show tonight / but I don’t really want to go, do I? / Please bless me with a good excuse / ’cause I don’t want to see the Blue Man Group.” It’s strangely hypnotic, with a tremendous cacophony of noise to see the track out, and it made me research the Blue Man Group as, I’ve got to be honest, I’d never heard of them before I heard this song! Clearly I’ve been in the dark, as apparently they’ve been going since 1987 and are huge!
‘Spa‘ is an oddity. Weird loops of soulful vignettes, breakbeats and Erhard enquiring “How often do you wash your bikini?” in an entertaining lyrical encounter. It’s pleasant enough but sometimes it just feels like Erhard is just trying to be too clever for her own good. ‘Package‘ suffers the same fate, and feels a little art school. The aforementioned brilliance of ‘Hot Family‘ rescues things somewhat at this point, before the dizzyingly lopsided backing of ‘Stash‘ comes in, not sure whether it wants to be a poetry piece or a country song, with its confusingly out of place steel guitars giving me vertigo. Weirdly it kind of works though.
Anna Erhard is at her best though when she delivers her wide-eyed irreverence over the top of upbeat indie-ish rock, and to that end, ‘Not Rick‘ makes up the holy trinity of ‘best tracks’ along with ‘170‘ and ‘Hot Family‘. The gentler closing number ‘Teeth On The King‘ reflects on the way the Covid pandemic changed people’s lives and made them more lethargic than they were prior to that. It’s a pretty tune and a decent way to wrap up proceedings.
So, in summation, Anna Erhard’s latest album is not a disappointment, in any shape or form – in fact, it contains a couple of the best songs I’ve heard this year – but it just doesn’t quite make that jump from “good” to “great” often enough. It’s undoubtedly a good record though, there’s no doubt about that.
