Anya Anastasia: Dissenter | 4ZZZ Brisbane 102.1FM

- Anya Anastasia is many things, but is perhaps most known in popular culture as the amnesiac, orphan, composite Russian heroine of the late ‘90’s animated feature Anastasia. The name has been borrowed for a newer incarnation however, adding still more composites to the character, our Anya here is a “chanteuse, comedian, singer/song-writer, and terrible, lanky, Swarovski-encrusted, wannabe acrobat”, or at least that’s how she describes herself. Shrugging off some of that baggage, we’ll be mostly concerned with the singer/song-writer sliver of her talents, as Anya Anastasia takes up her guitar in protest, railing against a world that appears to have gone mad.

She is the Dissenter of the title and is here to present a list of complaints about issues that are becoming increasingly overwhelming. To wit, she opens with Losing Wild. A percussively punctuated threnody, accentuating every step taken by the creatures of the natural world as they trudge to their extinction, under the unrelenting sun. The thudding rhythm, guitar and banjo work is borrowed, I think, from West-African desert rock and the sounds of the Sahel are appropriate for evoking the dry, burning distance covered here. The verses are brow-beating but contrasted wonderfully by the beautiful chorus as Anastasia sings “My wild heart / Goes with them” as though it were a ghost, flitting across the landscape.

Smog & Mirrors is a slightly more cryptic beast, but certainly pushing the same cart as the previous number. It bemoans the insanity of a system which pushes forward like a spring-loaded machine, only to snap back like a Sisyphusian nightmare, forcing its victims to repeat the process, lost, endlessly searching through the smog. Sounds like modern life to me, but set to wild, African rhythms. It might be lunacy, but at least we can dance to it.

The building pressure of the EP to this point bursts into an ethereal, gothic gas-cloud on the beguiling Spinning Heads. The insane journeys through the smoke are derailed, Anya Anastasia sprawled on the ground, lost in a slow psychosis she sings: “Oh my head still spins / The state I was in it lingers, still / Thoughts won’t stand still / Ideas float around my head like butterflies, tied.” The mellifluous sweetness which is deployed sparingly elsewhere on the record is in full force on this song and it is perhaps the loveliest you’ll find here.

Too committed to the cause to lie down for long, Anastasia is back again and marching along to the same strident rhythms that drove the beginning of the record. The title track forms the list of complaints that have been tallied up so far into a mission statement and protest song, calling the revolutionaries to the barricade, singing: “Moving a mountain of shifting sands / No glory in a war that begins where it ends / Give a spade to the ones who’ll take a stand / There’s too much power in not enough hands.” It’s certainly a little more lyrical than “Hey hey, ho ho, capitalism has got to go.”

Interestingly, the record doesn’t end on the picket line, but with a coda of more gothic strangeness in a song called Goes Untold. Anya Anastasia is lost in her own mind again and touched by horror worthy of Un Chien Andalou as she cries out “But My Eye’s Been Cut By Paper” we leave her ‘stumbling blind’, searching for something ineffable but essential: “It goes untold / The memories of old / They go untold / These memories of old.”

It’s a discomfiting note to finish with, not storming the corridors of power, but lost and alone in the darkness, searching for answers, like the amnesiac heroine from whom Anastasia takes her name. It’s also like the world we live in, beset by troubles, without any clear and easy solution. Yet if you listen, carefully, to the dissenting voice, the answer may be there to be found: in the face of the silvery moon, in the feel of cool stone to the touch or the voice of running water. In her final words Anya Anastasia describes an ancient figure there to help us when we abandon our modern madness. As the world rages “she took my hand and waited” says Anastasia. The Dissenter is too often a voice alone, set against forces that are legion. It is some consolation to be reminded that with music and wisdom, dissent can be a bond, shared, so that we are not truly alone.

- Chris Cobcroft.