Send "Poe " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Sputnikmusic |
 The thing I like best about discussing music is when you can tell you’re getting someone interested in something they’d ordinarily never hear. In my mind, there’s no greater compliment than “That actually sounds really cool, I’ll have to check them out!” and there’s no one I can use to elicit that reaction from my friends more than Poe. Maybe it’s the obvious love of her songs in my voice, or maybe it’s the way I drop people into the middle of the complex story surrounding “Haunted” and deftly guide them out again, but there’s something about this CD that seems to capture people’s imaginations just before it captures their hearts.Let’s back up a bit, back to the late 90s. Poe (Born Anne Danielewski) had released her first album, “Hello”, which had garnered praise for the innovative way it blended natural instruments with R&B samples. With lyrics such as “This is Jezebel in Hell/I wanna kill you, I wanna blow you...away,” Poe found herself lumped in with the angry girl rockers during the mid-90’s boon of female singer-songwriters. Feeling creatively tapped out after this first effort, she found the inspiration for her next record in a story seemingly ripped from Hollywood: She had a dream in which her dead father, Polish-born film director Tad Danielewski, urged her to ‘find his voice’. Poe had an often-rocky relationship with her father (As evidenced by the lyric “Fathers are black holes that suck up the light” from her earlier disc), who died in 1993, two years prior to Poe’s first album. As a difficult task, Poe and her brother, author Mark Z. Danielewski (This will be important later), went through their father’s belongings, finding cassettes of their late father’s voice. The cassettes contained everything from old lectures he had recorded to audio letters to the two of them, stretching as far back as their births, which he had never shared with them. The cassettes took their emotional toll, and the siblings retreated to their own separate worlds to deal with them in the only ways they knew how: Mark set to work on a novel, and Poe locked herself away in a studio to begin work on her second CD, the aptly-titled “Haunted”. She emerged two years later with 15 filled hard drives and this completed tribute to her father....full text |
| Popmatters |
| From its first moments, Poe's Haunted builds mood out of its own sparseness. Even when the album layers sounds, there's a frightening intimacy in every moment. Poe does not shy away from facing down the darkness, sampling her own family member's voices, including recordings of her father who died in 1993. As uncomfortable as it is beautiful, Haunted's intense personal nature is both disturbing and compelling. It is less an album than an experience. The search for self saturates Haunted, from the tortured "Wild" to the unapologetic "Not A Virgin" to the impassioned "Could've Gone Mad". In each song, Poe is trying to make sense of the total of her life, from her childhood memories (eerily represented by the voices of little girls), to the death of her father, to her current fears and vulnerabilities. Her messages are conveyed through her unique use of traditional instruments deconstructed through computers and then recombined to create a very atmospheric sound....full text |
| Rollingstone |
| On her second album, former angry-young-singer-songwriter Poe comes on like an ambient arena queen. Unfortunately, Haunted reverberates with tired samples, rehashed echo effects and beats so plodding they could stop a metronome. Poe deserves some props for her blond ambition: Her surprisingly effective voice just about salvages Haunted. When she growls, "Come a little bit closer/I wanna look at you" on "Control," she conveys just enough menace to jar the song from its overproduced narcolepsy. Haunted's first single, the sticky pink "Walk the Walk," has clumsy lines like "I wanna walk to the beat of my own drum," but Poe's attitudinal snarl sounds smart -- smart like a fox looking to burrow into the MTV Buzz Bin. Can't wait for the remix album. (RS 851)...full text |
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