Bright Red/Tightrope

LAURIE ANDERSON: “Bright Red/Tightrope” (Warner Bros)

People who like this kind of album will find this the kind of album which they like.

A rather fatuous opening line, I admit, but in this case it’s an apt one. Those of you who own the complete works of Laurie Anderson will have no difficulty in continuing the trend and those of you who are usually left stone cold indifferent by the experience will be left . . . stone cold indifferent by the experience!

A bit like Anthony Hopkins in The Silence Of The Lambs, Laurie Anderson is an acquired taste. And while I wouldn’t exactly like to eat her records for breakfast, dinner and tea, she’s the one cereal killer you can have a good munch to in between meals.

Even though each side of this record has a separate title(‘Bright Red’ and ‘Tightrope’ respectively), it appears to be a continuous whole, each personal meditation following on logically from the next.

The introverted musings and intense, personal reflections of this avant garde New Yorker are supplemented by the odd biblical quotation (Isaiah 13 : 21 for any Bible junkies out there) and even a smattering of Edward Lear’s The Owl And The Pussycat. Is this woman for surreal or what!

A Laurie Anderson song occupies that twilight No Parking zone between David Lynch and David Byrne with one wheel on the highway and the other with its hubcap in the subconscious.

“Secret codes and cryptograms/ I’m lost in your words, I’m swimming” she sings on ‘Freefall’. Look who’s talking, as, er, John Travolta would say.

You will not, therefore, be surprised to hear that Brian Eno is the major behind the ground controls; while other session musicians include Adrian Belew, Marc Ribot and Lou Reed who duets with Laurie on ‘In Our Sleep’ which will not go down as The Man’s most inspired moment ( but if we can forgive him working with U2 and Simple Minds, in the past, then surely we must find him culpable but not accountable here).

Indeed, Laurie Anderson seems to be disconcertingly up to date with the ‘comings and goings’ (especially the goings) of Irish politics when she delivers an open letter to to Albert and Harry on ‘Muddy River’: “And you’re alone on an island now turning in/Did you think this was the way /Your world would end?/There is no pure land now/ No safe place/And we stand here on the pier watching you drown.”

A poignant and dignified way to end a song, methinks. And an even better way to end a review.

• Nicholas G. Kelly