Anna Cordell: Nobody Knows Us | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- After more than ten years away, Melbourne singer-songwriter Anna Cordell returns, almost from beyond the grave. The cold grasp of death is ever present on album opener After Tomorrow: an uncharacteristically piano-driven memento mori that wraps up life and death into one tight bundle of tension. Without really contextualising the event, it places a pregnant Cordell “I see your shaking hands / And my baby moves inside” at the side of someone dying:  “And I face mortality / As I see you lose your own”. There really is no respite from some of the most rending lyrics on her new record, Nobody Knows Us. Take for instance “I sit here and watch your eyes / Fill with tears and fright.” It’s signal of a record that is less obsessed with death than it is with the fragility and brokenness of life.

That opening number is one of Cordell’s darkest, most Sarah Blasko efforts, but its urgency pushes unsettling tendrils throughout much of what’s on offer here. You can hear it in the ethereal and otherworldly title track, featuring the much more characteristic, rapidly-picked guitar that Cordell is so adept at. Even as it sweeps away from such stark acknowledgements of death, it throws up its hands and admits “Nobody know us / But the spirit of the sky”, whatever that might be. Elemental apparitions aside, there’s always an acknowledgement of the presence of another person, a very personal interlocutor, also wending its way through each cut here, even as that correspondent is bound up in strange rituals “There's a river at the end of the street / We swam there together / Then you baptised me.” Actually that sky spirit, I think, is God? The third partner, joining hands in this troubled trio. God, here, seems both to be a moral bedrock and a problematic patriarch: as much a figure of anxiety and uncertainty as one of comfort and solace.

The other, human figure becomes clearer on third number,Tried So Hard, which admits to more mundane, romantic issues, although possibly religious ones too: “If I cannot see / The way that you see / Will you still love me?” The urgency never lets up, as though the ten years away, motherhood and starting a small business has, rather than mellowed Cordell, made her a bundle of nerves. Looking at that list of pursuits, actually -you don't even need to throw faith in- why wouldn’t she be wound up like a spring? For all that, there’s plenty of beauty on offer: especially in the cello interludes that provide a contrasting lushness to the brittle guitar work, across the record.

You takes up the relationship woes and drags them into truly eerie territory. Raking over the return of an old-lover who, unbeknownst to Cordell, until the very end, has come back with a partner and a baby boy. The music moves like a chill winter breeze, leaving emotions like frost-bitten leaves.

Fortunately -for me at least- there’s an arc to the album. The well nigh howling darkness it opens with slowly warms into the back half of the record. You can hear the thaw begin through the modal uncertainties of Lie Awake: where the possibilities of redeeming the romantic mistakes of the past are mulled over. There’s still an undeniably funereal quality at work, as in Lay Your Head, where an invitation to share the load feels, somehow, more like lying out of night and slowly expiring in the evening chill: “When the weather turns cold / When you feel older than you should / When you’re tired of trying to get it right / And you feel like giving up the fight. / Come and lay your head down on me / Look up at the stars / Lsten to the trees.” The warmth steadily increases though, mostly in the music, even as the lyrics remain jagged and uncertain. See a number like Between Two Eternities where Cordell wrestles with religion and the horrors of the world but sugars it with an upbeat folk reminiscent of Joni Mitchell’s warmth, or even that of The Carpenters, if you use your imagination a little.

An elegance creeps in, circumscribing those earlier terrors, a mental strength expressed through the music and finally in the lyrics too. Despite the endless motifs of deadly chill, late album track Wintertime is actually warmly robust with its colours of spring and in the following number, Turn, Cordell makes an explicit promise: “I won’t turn around / I won’t be dragged down / You can’t drag me down.”

That strength is transmuted into a wistfulness in the final number of Nobody Knows Us, a forgiving but clear-eyed recollection of a relationship pulled apart by the vicissitudes of people and life. It’s, at the same time, generous in its forgiveness but standoffish, brutalised by what came before. It’s like a recapitulation and armistice between all the record’s melting warmth and freezing shards of ice.

Nobody Knows Us is a very finely crafted record. Pretty perfectly produced by Ben Edwards -like a moment of clarity at the eye of a blizzard- and performed by a woman who knows and has absorbed the lessons laid down by the greats of her craft. That includes the past, from Sandy Denny to Nick Drake and the present in the likes of Midlake and Weyes Blood. It stands Anna Cordell in good company with Australia's handful of contemporary dry, studied, guitar-picking singer-songwriters: the likes of Lucy Roleff, Obscura Hail and Pascal Babare. Stretching from moments of chilling sorrow to redeeming warmth and never letting go of all the ambiguities in-between, I think you’ll struggle to find a more elegant, personal record than Nobody Knows Us, anytime soon.

- Chris Cobcroft.
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