Anna von Hausswolff – Struggle With the Beast

Picked by Dylan Graves, here’s one for fans of an extended intro…

[Video]
[7.71]Will Adams: On first listen, I enjoyed the suspense of whether a vocal would ever arrive (it does, after nearly four minutes of preamble). I figured repeat spins would have diminishing returns, but the knotty arrangement leading to the unleashing of Anna von Hausswolff’s commanding voice remained as compelling as the first time.
[7]

Ian Mathers: About three minutes in I was okay with it just being an instrumental, but that doesn’t mean I minded when von Hausswolff started singing. It’s a commanding performance, and later on as things have built to a even heavier frenzy and the saxophone asserts itself again, I didn’t mind the protracted running time at all. It’s got sturm und drang, and you can probably manage to dance to it!
[8]

Claire Davidson: If “Struggle With the Beast” were limited to its first three and a half minutes, I’d have no trouble calling it a great track: the song opens with an eerily excitable saxophone riff that feels perfectly unkempt amongst a rumbling drum patter and backdrop of searing cellos. The entire sonic atmosphere evokes the kind of madcap mysticism that feels primed to summon the occult, even before the addition of the imposing organ work, making its rhythmic lack of abandon all the more infectious. When the song opens up for Anna von Hausswolff’s vocals, though, the entire balance is thrown askew — her timbre is far too clear and lyrical for a song this tangibly haunted. This discrepancy appears in her lyrics, too: as she describes the feeling of surrendering to a kind of depressive psychosis, one expects for her delivery to grow more feral, more guttural, but instead, she just soars above her instruments, breezing past anything in her stead. Here, the track deflates amidst its own chaos, the frenetic crashing of cymbals subsuming every other note in the mix, preventing the song from developing a more imposing lower end to symbolize that viscera being excised from von Hausswolff’s psyche. For all of its restless unease, the track fails to truly conjure a sense of scale worthy of that titular ghastliness — though, admittedly, one can hardly attribute this to a lack of trying on von Hausswolff’s part.
[6]

Nortey Dowuona: The comfort inherent in the saxophone makes it easy to slot into popular music in a way even the flute is not. There’s the depth and furor it displays when played, the gentility and geniality it confers onto each song where it is placed, the warmth and richness as it is forced behind the human voice, a tone which even in all its richness is rendered impotent in its own fury next to the sneering screed a tenor sax can emit. Unlike the trumpet, the French horn, the clarinet and flute, the saxophone can gel every tone and spread deeply across the mix in whichever way you choose to arrange for it, even acting as a fulcrum in much in the same manner as the voice. The thing is, people can easily pick apart the lyrics and cadences and tone of the human voice, but the saxophone can say anything at all, leaving a mark on your own spirit in the same manner, but leaving you in the lurch. Unless you pay attention to it, it could be telling you yes, worry, I am deeply, deeply hurt, help me, but you can’t put it into words, and so you just hear a cry. What it is crying about, you won’t know.
[8]

Al Varela: What a maelstrom of a song! The apocalyptic instrumental intro with all those haunting saxophones truly feels like a descent into hell. Even as we get to Anna von Hausswolff herself and her more structured, but still chaotic vocals, you never get the feeling of scorching fires and relentless doom off your back. I dare say it’s operatic.
[10]

Alfred Soto: The vocal comes as a surprise but not a shock. The headiness of the track — the saxes and guitars swirl like the Stooges’ “L.A. Blues” — had commanded enough attention.
[7]

Iain Mew: This isn’t The Intros Jukebox, as Zach Lyon once wrote. If it was, though, the swirling atmospheric sax storm that “Struggle With the Beast” emerges from would be a [10]. The song is pretty good too.
[8]