To Solve The Noise In You

Anna Fox Rochinski “Everybody’s Down”

Anna Fox Rochinski’s Cherry is a perfect example of the distiction between a debut and a solo debut – the songs display all the confidence of a seasoned professional, but also the enthusiasms and undiluted idiosycracies of a musician who’s no longer confined by the democratic processes of being part of a band. Cherry sounds like a very deliberate album, the kind where it’s a safe guess that each song went through many revisions, arrangements, and mixes before arriving at something close to perfect. This approach can suffocate some material but Rochinski gives her crisp, tight arrangements enough negative space to breathe and give her expressive voice some room to move.

“Everybody’s Down” is a particularly strong showcase for her vocals, which seem to glide around her grooves as she makes her way up from the lower end of her register on the verses up to near the top of her range on the chorus. I’m not quite clear on the POV in the lyrics – the lines about offers and contracts are simultaneously specific and vague – but I love the way the refrain “who supports this brand of violence? / leave it to me to get to the bottom of it” comes across as a joke at the expense of clueless and privileged white people who mean well but rarely offer more than shallow gestures when it comes to trying to help anyone but themselves. It’s hard for me not to take the song as satire of complicit people waking up to a reality outside their bubble, but it’s not so brutal to have no sympathy for its subject. If anything, it feels like it’s meant for a self-aware audience who’s experienced some version of this awkward awakening.

Buy it from Bandcamp.