Her first appearance since 2012.
[Video][Website]
[6.12]
Hannah Jocelyn: Between her dramatic press tour for Hopelessness and her long-winded, intense Facebook posts, Anohni is clearly not one for small gestures. This lack of subtlety has permeated her music from the beginning, and it can be effective, even powerful, on songs like “Hope There’s Someone” and recent single “4 Degrees.” Other times, though, she can lean toward overwrought theatrics, shock value, and, on the weaker parts of Hopelessness, unconvincing conjecture. Naturally, a hip-hop song about an nine-year-old Afghan’s death wish may sound like a red flag for those other times. That “Drone Bomb Me” somehow manages to hold together is a testament to both Anohni’s stunning performance and Hudson Mohawke’s bombastic production. As if to confirm the pop-as-trojan-horse thesis of the accompanying album, the horn blasts seem to deliberately mimic the flow of “Jumpman”, and Anonhi’s “after all” ad-lib sounds surprisingly playful considering the next line is a tragic cry of “I’m partly to blame!” The sudden fade out is the one moment in her entire career where more drama would be an improvement– it’s an underwhelming ending to an otherwise fascinating song.
[7]
Alfred Soto: Her tremulous sobs and familiar weltschmerz have rarely cohered into music I could stand for longer than it took to crush my smartphone, and one of those rarities is a Hercules & Love Affair collaboration, so I was prepared to recoil. Yet for the first time since 2008, Anohni is compelling: frightened and frightening. Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never’s programmed beats reflect the shifting tectonics of a planet that may not exist before long. “Drone Bomb Me” commingles the erotic and the geopolitical in fascinating and chilling ways. “Blow me from the mountains/And into the sea” centers the listener in a region where such destruction at the hands of the United States is commonplace. Thanatos, meet Eros.
[8]
Natasha Genet Avery: Living in Silicon Valley, the drones I encounter deliver groceries and take aerial photos of extreme sports. Clean and mechanical, or even cute and feminized, they’re detached from the violence they inflict. With Anohni’s first wail, delivered against a moment of quiet, she shatters that image as her persona confidently addresses the U.S government with “drone bomb me/blow me from the mountains and into the sea,” one of the most alarming opening lines I’ve heard this year. She blends the language of sacrifice, romance, surveillance, and religion in disturbing new ways, as her persona asks to be “chosen,” desired, eliminated. Anohni’s haunting vocals float over a simple synth progression, and the track is understated and delicate, a striking contrast to the gory reality of “crystal guts” splayed across the ground after a drone strike. Anohni transports her listener to a reality they ignore and implicates them in its tragedy– an act that is uncomfortable and acutely necessary.
[8]
Taylor Alatorre: Reducing Middle Eastern lives to inert bodies that exist to be haplessly torn apart by Western military might: strike one. Romanticizing, even if ironically, the “crystal guts” and “purple” released in the explosion: strike two. Casting your English-American self as a nine-year-old Afghani girl, roleplaying her death in love song format, then trying to strengthen your moral position by meekly admitting that you’re “partly to blame”: strike three. I’m not even sure if all these critiques are valid, but if a protest song has me thinking more about the flaws in its message than the failings of our system, something is wrong.
[3]
Juana Giaimo: “Dromb Bomb Me” is too delicate and romantic to reflect the desperation, horror and emotional chaos of the lyrics’ theme.
[5]
Jessica Doyle: Lying on my back with my eyes shut because this seems to be better felt than heard, or maybe absorbed, through the pores of the skin; rage that sounds like yearning; surrender that barely hides command; drama that disguises a careful control. This track is either needling satire or unrestrained emotion and either way it’s in the very worst of taste, which is to say artistic or shocking or some other word that does nothing save flatter the person who chose it. I feel like a fraud. I feel like nothing I have felt is big enough for these waves of sound. At some point the word camp is supposed to come up. Or melodramatic, maybe. Words that assign the speaker some sort of remove from the emotions provoke, a promise of rational distance, of heads kept. My head hurts, listening. I’m open, oozing.
[9]
Cassy Gress: Anohni says this is about a young Afghani girl whose family has been blown up and she wants to be blown up too. From that perspective, this is horrifying, gross, and feels exploitative. You could also just hear “drone bomb me” as an awkward metaphor for the strength of attraction, but it feels crass that way too.
[1]
Claire Biddles: Anohni’s talent is subversion through familiar song form. One of my favorite of her songs is “Fistful of Love,” recorded when she was still performing under the Antony and the Johnsons moniker. “Fistful of Love” is a ballad — a traditional, almost musically corny love song about what? Domestic violence or consensual masochism? I’ve been listening to the song for ten years and I still don’t know. Maybe it’s both. But what happens when a (consensually?) violent lover is switched for a nation, a state, an ideology? Who is complicit? who is (forced to be) submissive? In “Drone Bomb Me,” the love song tradition is still present, but this time it’s in a club, sonically closer to “Blind” (my other favourite Anohni song), the stone-cold disco classic recorded with Hercules and Love Affair. Anohni adopts the voice and language of longing from a thousand sad disco songs — ‘Choose me tonight /let me be the one that you choose tonight’ — in an the absurd, disturbing, deeply sad seduction of death. Like in “Fistful of Love,” the language of (personal or universal) terror and the language of submissive sexuality are entangled, but in “Drone Bomb Me” the context of the song is reported on news tickers and 24-hour television broadcasts, not hidden in the private, abstract bedroom of two lovers. In this case there’s no question about the consent of the violence.
[8]