Send "Laurie Anderson " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Laurie Anderson's 40-year career bucks classification, incorporating performance art, music, spoken word, video, and more. To mention John Zorn, Lou Reed, and Philip Glass only glosses her collaborations with the American avant-garde. She's also crossed over in interesting and unexpected ways, whether voicing a singing tot in The Rugrats Movie, or hitting #2 on the 1981 UK Singles Chart with "O Superman (For Massenet)", a doomsday anthem combining the vocoder with an aria from Le Cid. That angelic, robotic voice is often reprised on Homeland, her first new album in a decade, which fans will welcome as an heir to her definitive performance piece, United States. It's also a perfect starting point; an exquisite state-of-the-union dispatch as only Anderson, America's darkly comic conscience, can provide.A songful yet distressed Neo-Romantic mode anchors forays into techno, jazz, drone, and minimal electronics. Top-notch guests like Zorn, Antony, and Kieran Hebden add their unique perspectives to Anderson's probing keyboards and violins. The music is spacious, mercurial, and thoroughly conceived. Anderson's vocals hover between speech and song, polemics and poetry, apocalyptic and redemptive fervors. And that's as far as generalizations will go. Homeland teems with the same variety and sprit as the U.S. itself. These songs have been developing live for years, so naturally, Iraq and Wall Street loom large. The persistence of those quandaries makes the material feel timely, even oracular, a quality for which Anderson is known. "O Superman" gained fresh attention after 9-11 for its images of American planes drawing ominously nearer. (On a lighter note, its vocals predicted everything from Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek" to the ongoing Auto-Tune craze.) She's still broadcasting from the day after tomorrow. The organic house track "Only an Expert" schematically de tails the hubris of authorities who consolidate power by creating problems only they can solve. Had the album been delayed a little longer, a verse about the BP oil leak would have fit perfectly alongside the global warming controversy and the banking bailout....full text |
| Popmatters |
| Laurie Anderson’s Homeland originally started out as a “concert poem” that the legendary performance artist collaborated on with Lou Reed during her 2008 world tour—notably, this was also during the period of George W. Bush’s final months in office. Considered to be a 21st century extension of her 1983 multimedia project United States I-IV, the concert poem offered a stinging, uncompromising look at post-9/11 America; a time when civil liberties were squashed like bugs in the name of security; cameras watched every move in public; the economy was played in a rich man’s game of craps; wars were waged on hunches and innuendos; and foreign policy was treated by the Bush administration like the proverbial redheaded stepchild. Thus inspired, it was a challenging, humorous, moving and confrontational piece of musical art that left audiences equally intrigued and angered. It was said that a few people walked out in the middle of the show at London’s Barbican Centre, apparently put off by Anderson’s polarizing views of the state of America and the war in Iraq. Not long before, Anderson was deemed a ‘threat to national security’ by the FBI after she sent out a new musical instrument she calls the “talking stick”—which is essentially a baton hotwired with buttons devised to make different sounds—via FedEx to a Chicago museum on the same day Bush was in town. Perhaps that experience harbored some creative influence on the composition of Homeland as well. Two years later, Anderson’s release of Homeland is the hotly anticipated soundtrack from her tour, and also her first proper album in nearly a decade. Easily her most enjoyable and pop friendly work since 1982’s Big Science, the album version of Anderson’s concert-poem, much like the stage production, is a very challenging endeavor on the offset....full text |
| Nytimes |
| From the beginning of her career Laurie Anderson has cast an analytical eye over American culture and politics and turned her observations into cutting musical works that straddle the line between art song and stand-up comedy. Her most durable essay on the subject is the 1983 multimedia work “United States I-IV,” a work that came to mind often during her performance of her newest piece, “Homeland,” at Zankel Hall on Wednesday evening. “Homeland” is essentially a 100-minute update, a new volume to put alongside “United States” (as will be physically possible when Nonesuch releases the work on CD.) Ms. Anderson performs in her signature style: alternately singing and speaking, sometimes with electronic processing on her voice (making her sound like a man, for example, or giving her voice a choral halo), and playing the electric violin and keyboards. Her spare ensemble is a hybrid chamber group and rock band, with Peter Scherer, a keyboardist; Skuli Sverrisson, a bass guitarist; and Okkyung Lee, a cellist. “Homeland” deals partly with the loss of freedom in a security state and partly with the Iraq war and contemporary war in general. Ms. Anderson evokes images of a young woman with a “baby face” enlisting in the United States Army as a way to pay for her education, and young Palestinians wearing suicide vests, observing that war today is “a kid’s war,” another “children’s crusade,” with no restrictions: “anyone can join.” A song with echoes of a 1950s ballad style, updated by way of early, parodistic Frank Zappa and a dash of electronica, examines a sort of Rumsfeldian cynicism, represented by the assertion that our problems are so complex that only experts can deal with them. Ms. Anderson transforms that idea into a close relative: that problems are only problems when experts say they are. Torture? No problem. Invading a country and causing chaos and civil war? No problem. Experts, she tells us, are people who carry malpractice insurance because their solutions often become the problem....full text |
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