The Places
Songs for Creeps
(High Plains Sigh, 2006)

Amy Annelle’s time will come. Her albums are already generally well received, and garner predictable comparisons to Emmylou, Welch, and Waits. Columnists in local weeklies often take initiative to preview or review her shows favorably. Her songs roam through states of brooding, tradition, clamor, and cheer, each branded by the fire of her voice—storm-honed, jagged, and ageless as driftwood. She’s backed up Jandek, and Okkervil River, and plays often with the legendary Michael Hurley. Yet what remains is for “Annelle” to become the household name it deserves to be, even if only in the music-obsessed houses of record stores, practice rooms, rock-crit namedropping pageants, and creaky-floored rural haunts that smell of whiskey, ash, and detritus-caked boot prints, and Songs for Creeps is the album that should have made it happen. 

In roughly 10 years, whether under her own name or with backup as the Places, Annelle has never made a bad album. In fact, she’s made nothing but a string of exceptionally solid and beautifully forlorn albums—a claim which few artists working today can make (not that she necessarily would—I’m making it for her). Songs for Creeps remains the latest kink in that twine; the third proper Places LP if you exclude 2005’s fantastic covers album, Fawns With Fangs, and the two strictly solo records released under her own name, though it’s the sixth Annelle-based album overall. While it did garner some requisite praise in its day—a 7.6 from Pitchfork a month after its release; an eventual #8 spot on one of the Billboard Critic’s Choice Top 10s of 2006—it still somehow failed to generate the sustained buzz it deserved. After all, it did fall between two hotly anticipated albums by two other established giants in the indie-folk field: Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s immaculate The Letting Go in September, and then Joanna Newsom’s feverishly awaited Ys in November. While neither bares much similarity to the Places, there’s nevertheless an overlap of presumed audience, and for fans of these still-forming folk strata, it was a lot to take in. Couple that with the relative disadvantage of being self-released (High Plains Sigh is the record label run by Annelle for the express purpose of publishing her own works), and what you’ve got is a dark horse on a desert island.

Teeming with trepidation and spiritual tumult that’s at once existential, artistic, romantic, even sexual, Songs for Creeps conquers its pitch darkness through the light of the escape that is its own melodious transcendence. While not as deliberate as a concept album, themes of doubt, the impossibility of true self-expression, and escape by ways of death, drugs, sleep, and sex run artfully and harrowingly throughout. Both musically and conceptually, Creeps is as strong as it is bleak from start to finish, while also displaying a breadth of songwriting capability, as well as creativity in the recording and production. It sports just enough studio flare and psychedelic accentuations to sate the indie set, yet remains authentic and timelessly rustic enough to fly just as well on the overcast stages of outback county fairs. It’s an inadvertent niche, limited only by a listener’s capacity for the undauntedly morose. (“Slit me up from gut to throat and call it a victory,” sings Annelle in “Mercy Me”, in but one of the album’s more tormented passages.) Yet along with the lyrical omnipresence of wraiths both literal and emotional, there’s a warmth and redemption exuded in the execution of these songs that spreads from underneath them like the expansive roots of an underground fungus.

Annelle’s studio craftiness and highly capable partners bring the Appalachian-Gothic rehab folk of Creeps to such Technicolor fruition that it’s easy to take for granted its juxtaposition of the more laissez-faire atmospherics (and slight hiss) of three songs self-recorded straight to four-track cassette. “I’m A-Gone Down to the Green Fields”, for example, is a striking four-track gem sandwiched between two deft studio productions. In this angelically harmonized, poison-flowered dirge to the sort of windowless bar in which the hopeless start drowning sorrows before noon, the singer agonizes over the inadequacy of expression in the midst of deep frustration, all by way of graceful acoustic strumming and gorgeous vocals. The backdrop of tape noise, though audible from the start, becomes only the tiniest bit intrusive towards the track’s end, as soft, lingering guitars float off for a half-minute of ethereal psychedelia, after which its whisper subsides seamlessly into the next subtle drone—the deep bass hum of the following song, “Such as the Earth (Neveroff’s Fate).”

“Such as the Earth” then leaps into the saddle of an upbeat boot-stomp gallop (called “bron-y-aur stomps” in the liner notes) and a major, anthem-strength melody, and springs altogether from a chapter of Tolstoy’s Resurrection, in fact borrowing its title and other lyrical phrases directly from the great work’s prose. (Apparently Tolstoy is to Places as Tolkien is to Zeppelin.) It’s a chapter in which characters react to news of the suicide of an associate, Neveroff; in the song, the singer encounters Neveroff in a dream of the afterlife, where the two commune in silence, underwater. “I wasn’t much for talking, neither was he, and so we got on beautifully” she sings, tethered once again to the pain of being incapable of expressing herself in words, yet this time elated by the opportunity not to bother, or to escape the need at all. Though consistent in its troubles, the album never defaults to any predictable whine or woe. Rather, it delves nakedly into its anxieties with an intensely (if downtrodden) human precision and timeless folk fortitude.

Truly an album of distinction, every song on Creeps stands up to such close consideration, while it’s just as magnetic when left to play through its entirety and enjoyed solely for its melodic peaks and rivers. Hell, even the artwork is striking. It’s the Places album that would be queen, clearly delineating Annelle as an artist to be watched, tracked, and paid regular attention to, lest one day she buck up and cease responding to the demon muses anchoring her to such creature coffins and the dank, living soil between them and us.

Listen: “Miner’s Lie” [at highplainssigh.com]

Read more from Ex Post Facto:

Warren Zevon: The Wind

Death Magnetic: Better, Shorter, Cut

Genesis: Trespass