Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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156 of 156 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Watch this one stick around, April 11, 2003
We find Poe on her second album brazen and boundlessly inspired, flexing her creative range with more quality ideas than can possibly be crammed into seventeen songs and a half-dozen genres.I read an interview on how this amazing disc came about. Finding herself at a loose end creatively after her first album, Poe describes an unsettling dream where her late father mysteriously urges her to "find his voice". Some time later she unearthed a forgotten box of family tapes dating from early childhood, featuring a revelatory array of personal voice recordings by none other than her often remote and complex Dad. Confronting the material wasn't easy at first. Then "suddenly I had 700 songs I needed to write, all of them at my fingertips". Talk of a concept album alarmed her backers, who suggested she "capitalize on her fan base" instead. Undaunted, Poe withdrew to a private studio and cozied up with her ProTools digital audio workstation, throwing 12-16 hours a day into the quintessential labor of love. Excluding all but an inner circle of accomplices, emerging two years and fifteen filled hard drives later with this incandescent work. And these songs!! Opulent and gripping, cohesive yet intricate, gloriously melodic, expansive, diverse. Up volume and sit back. Wade that first chilling intro into the heady rush of "Haunted" and I guarantee your pulse and breathing will have noticeably increased. Yes, the headlining "Hey Pretty" is a stunner, but I soon found it more of a bonus track alongside even more precocious siblings, "Control", "Terrible Thought", "Walk The Walk", "Wild", "5½ Minute Hallway"...on down the track list.. Each a consummate short story of it's own, with barely a mediocre moment anywhere. Songs intensely layered and multifaceted, yet always the sense of Poe in absolute command of her vision. Hard-as-nails guitar riffs blending to irresistible psychedeliscapes, shimmering codas, aching harmonies so fleeting I want to start throwing things. Startling detail, ravishing orchestration, that unbearably expressive voice warm and fragile and savage like the most ardent lover. There is a superb muscularity in Poe's music and especially her singing, a fusion of recklessness and control that sends shivers, puts a twist in your tummy and keeps you coming back for more. Why didn't we need lyrics with the documentation? Because every word is perfectly distinct. And if you miss one you will need to start again. To heighten the impact, Poe interweaves her father's disembodied voice with other soul-stirring memorabilia throughout, a mosaic of enthralling vignettes around his pervasive ghost. Unraveling with us a child's love, terror and loss, and things left unsaid, the captivating story never self-indulgent, accommodates us all. Elsewhere flash-forward; the enduring woman, compassionate but uncompromising, aware yet still vulnerable, challenging, unapologetically sexual. I have a feeling Poe's fan base is doing just fine. Against the best advice, she has pulled off an epic, timeless classic that stamps her unmistakable authority as an artist of great communicative power. She's also really, really good.
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55 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
It Helps to be a Poe Fan, November 16, 2000
I had the opportunity to see Poe (formerly known as Ann Danielewski) ...this past November 12. Something of an odd venue, except that this was a joint outing in accompaniment with her brother, the author Mark Danielewski, whose "House of Leaves" was recently published to some critical acclaim. She was to sing a number of songs from her new CD, "Haunted", but unfortunately I could only stick around for a couple of them.I do like this album, but I wonder if it is really something that would appeal to the casual music fan. This isn't something that you can just chunk into your CD player and let rip. It's a very complex, layered, intense work, and deeply personal as well. In its broadest outlines, it's an attempt by Poe to come to grips with her late father, who died in 1993, two years before her debut release with her "Hello" album. (I may be a little off with this chronology.) That particular outing featured a lyric that said "Fathers are black holes that suck up the light"; that might give you a hint of her family dynamic. Recently, while going through her father's stored belongings, she came across several cassette recordings of conversations/monologues that he had recorded years ago, and listening to this spectral voice from beyond the grave inspired "Haunted". Poe has incorporated numerous selections from these tapes into the new songs, weaving them in as commentaries, prologues, segues. In a sense, she is reaching out to her father one last time and trying to achieve...an understanding? A reconciliation? A truce? At the same time, "Haunted" is meant to be a kind of reflection of "House of Leaves" (her song "5 1/2 Minute Hallway" is directly inspired by a passage in her brother's work). The liner notes will point the reader to numerous references in the novel. Indeed, it is critical to read these notes. The recordings of her father don't always come through so clearly, so you might not understand what he is saying. Additionally, Poe has intertwined other speaking roles into the mix, so you need to read all of the lyrics to fully comprehend all of the players, as it were. This is a challenging album. If you're looking for something that is minimalist, you won't find it here. "Haunted" is very much a studio work and a producer's dream, an intricate tapestry of sound. (The live performance was done as "karaoke, Poe-style" as she put it, with the assistance of her DJ, Peyote Cody.) There's a lot to commend this album. (I particularly like the song "Control".) It is astonishingly brave, and if you allow yourself to let down your guard, you might be deeply moved. There's a lot of anger, a lot of pain. But it moves in the end to acceptance, a kind of healing, when the voice of a young Poe tells her father..."It's okay, you can go now." Some may find this to be too intimate, and on some level I wonder if the most intimate emotional turmoils of Poe are a fitting topic for only her second album. This seems a bit churlish on my part, but it is true that all of these songs work in concert to her one theme for "Haunted", and so there's far less of the carefree spirit and reckless experimentation that was so evident in "Hello". Approach with caution, and set aside one long evening to allow this work to sink in. And call your father.
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43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Haunting My CD Player - Forever, October 14, 2000
I have had this CD for a couple weeks now and it hasn't left my CD player since I brought it home. It is so amazing and I can really tell POE has matured since her debut album, Hello. My favorite track on Haunted is 'Wild'. The track makes a transition in the middle from serious rock to a clubby dance song. In 'If You Were Here' POE expresses how much she misses her father and feels he would be proud of his children, Annie Danielewski aka POE, and her brother, Mark Z. Danielewski. 'Haunted' is very much intertwined with her brother's book, "House of Leaves." POE's album and Mark's novel are two individual creative responses to the same events. Her brother says of the album, "It's not a soundtrack for the book. It's a parallax view of the same history." POE says," it's the album I've wanted to make for as long as I can remember. Finally, I had the resources I needed and the freedom to focus on nothing else but the task at hand." Once given the limitless space she needed POE created a masterpiece - an album that is sure to be among my all-time favorites.
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