Anita Lane
Dirty Pearl

"The captain's arm like a twisted rope, with A-N-I-T-A trying to wriggle between skull and dagger...".

It began like this, in the command cabin of a ship battered by the storm, one of the most tremendous musical delusions of all time. We know very well who was on that ship, just as we know very well the author of those terrifying, rambling words - and those (equally unsettling) that followed. ANITA, on the other hand... Yes, that Anita was indeed her. Impossible to forget, after all.

Just as it is impossible not to fall in love with this woman, once having come into contact with HER world; which for a long time was also the world of the man one instinctively thinks of whenever she is mentioned. Impossible not to fall in love with her, I said, if at the same time you are a lover of rock, or rather the most sensually perverse side of it. And of the Blues, of course, the one written with a capital letter, the one that is a disposition of the soul even before 12 mournful bars of lament and suffering. Extraordinary and monstrous (since everything is oxymoronic in Anita's world) is that the demons of the Blues have dwelled in the soul of this Australian girl with such a naïve, innocent, eternally childish appearance. Perhaps it was this (certainly ALSO this) that bewitched King Ink, who, seized by a sudden fever of passion, made her his Muse. But the term "Muse" is also reductive, partial, incapable of even hinting at the whole; it doesn't speak of a woman who could easily call a certain Rowland S. Howard by his first name, it doesn't speak of an artist who contributed to the records of the most iconoclastic Berlin band ever heard; and above all, it doesn't speak of a mind that produced things like "keys rain down like hair from heaven" and contemplated how "the thin fruit of passion dies in the light, stranger than kindness..."

...to come into contact with her world, I said. Well, "Dirty Pearl" is the most complete and perfect way to do so. Precisely because of its fragmentary, incoherent, poetic, absolutely brilliant nature. It's hard to say what strikes more about an album that already enchants from the magnificent cover portrait; perhaps that voice so deeply sensual, decadent, lascivious whispers laid upon a floating sea of distant sounds and echoes; perhaps those unmistakable arrangements born from the flair of the Bad Seeds, and those cavernous sepulchral voices filling the background like reverberations from the beyond; or perhaps those nocturnal uncertain atmospheres (sublime), letting the senses be captivated and dragged far away - now sweetly, now languidly, now painfully in the brutal roughness of a guitar that cuts, carves deeply. "Jesus ALMOST possessed me", Anita sings, leaving it to the listener to deduce that He didn't succeed; and the deduction is all too easy. Fragments of Genius, a collage constructed over a decade's work, an episode ("Picture Of Mary") written four-handed with Blixa Bargeld, another ("A Prison In The Desert") for which the only responsible one is the German; for the rest, they are almost all originals, given that even in the covers (how she knows how to choose them, folks...) the magic is destined to be renewed. And in that regard, we have a moody "Lost In Music" by Sister Sledge (with the noble signature of Nile Rodgers) and - and here we definitely hit the peaks - an "Sexual Healing" indefinable with earthly adjectives: an interpretation of pure eroticism and sensuality, as the legendary Marvin track requires - but with that extra touch of femininity that makes it truly something special; amidst bells, noises that seem swept away by the wind, and anthology-worthy vocal overdubs. 

Rare and priceless jewel: ESSENTIAL.