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Little Annie, "Soul Possession"
Few artists can boast debut albums as stunning as this one, making its reissue after nearly three decades of unavailability something of a major event.  Originally recorded in 1983, the Soul Possession sessions assembled a murderer's row of talented collaborators such as Crass and UK dub heavyweight Adrian Sherwood to back young Annie Anxiety's animated and unseemly tales from the dark side.  Rightfully considered an underground classic, this album captures a rare "super group" in which everyone involved was at the top of their game, giving birth to something truly disturbing and visionary.
Soul Possession has a somewhat improbable back-story, as the project was unknowingly set in motion when Annie decided to move from NYC to Germany following the dissolution of her band, Annie and the Asexuals (colorfully described in the liner notes as an "art-punk theater of pain").  Fate had other plans, and Annie wound up in London living with her new friends in Crass, an arrangement that resulted in the unexpectedly unpunk and tape-loop-informed Barbed Wire Halo 7", a collaboration with Penny Rimbaud that was issued on Crass Records in 1981.  Soon after, Annie met On-U Sound head Sherwood and the duo's shared love of dub resulted in this inventive and surprisingly dark collaboration.  Some mutual friends from the Crass collective were also pretty keen on dub at the time and gamely supplied much of the raw musical material.  In fact, Eve Libertine even takes lead vocals on one song, "Sad Shadows."
While a truly stellar outing for the most part, the album has two arguable flaws. The first is that Annie was occasionally a bit too conspicuous in betraying her punk/post-punk influences (such as with the anarcho-punk-esque lyrics in "Burnt Offerings"), which is unsurprising given her youth and the fact that she was living with Crass.  The second is that a cutting edge dub album recorded in 1983 necessarily sounds a little bit dated today.  Not as much as I'd expect, however– both Annie's vocals and Sherwood's production are outré and deranged enough to easily transcend such minor quirks though the slow, lurching drums and fretless bass sound are very much of their time.  In fact, it is pretty hard to tear my attention away from Annie's macabre and compelling narratives long enough to focus on much else.  Adrian, for his part, supplies more than enough studio-tweaked chaos and atmosphere to fill the gaps admirably.  Still, this is mostly Annie's show, and the album's highlights are those pieces where she pushes herself into singularly menacing, nightmarish territory.
The most disorienting of those songs is the uncomfortably lurid "Turkey Girl," where she sounds like a cross between Tom Waits and a depraved sex offender, dropping squirm-inducing lines like "you're my turkey fuck girl" and "I want to cut my cock on your pop top" as Sherwood unleashes bleeping and blooping electronics over a slinky bass line and horror movie piano.  Equally disturbed is the hitchhiker murder fantasy "Third Gear Kills," in which Annie ominously repeats "you're gonna die in the lay-by…tonight" and creepily describes stuffing a body in a trunk.  Remarkably, Bandez finds yet further frontiers in discomfort to explore with the absolutely stunning "Viet Not Mine, El Salvador Yours," employing a barrage of crazed-sounding overlapping voices, disjointed ramblings, moans, whimpers, and gasps over a sinisterly throbbing groove.
This album could not possibly be much further in tone from Annie's more recent work, though her infectious charisma remains a constant.  Bandez was not content here to merely indulge her dark side lyrically: she delivers her lines with a frightening conviction at times, sounding like someone teetering on the verge of a breakdown.  Even if Sherwood had played it relatively safe, Annie's damaged and threatening vocals could have easily carried the album, but he more than holds his own with his appropriately tense and hallucinatory soundscapes.  Despite all the echoing, gurgling, shimmering, and industrial textures, however, he still manages to maintain some rather propulsive grooves and unlikely hooks– a rather perverse accomplishment, as Annie's content renders the music singularly un-pop.  It all works beautifully, as I imagine this album would've been unlistenably raw and uncomfortable without such touches.  With them, Soul Possession is a deeply aberrant and uneasy near-masterpiece during its best moments.  This is still a very scary and harrowing album, of course, but it is not an inaccessible one.
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