ANEMONE - Beat My Distance

"Following last year’s terrific Baby Only You & I EP, Montreal singer-songwriter Chloé Soldevila is back with Anemone‘s debut album. It’s a nice mix of styles that manages to pull from different eras and genres — ’60s sunshine pop and yé-yé, krautrock, ’90s Madchester — into a sound that is distinctively theirs and, as Chloé puts it, captures “the feeling of driving endlessly on a sunny day with a lover, the feeling of dancing and forgetting about everything while feeling high on life.” Beat My Distance is an exceedingly charming debut album, filled to the brim with memorable melodies and great arrangements.

The album’s also a real showcase for the rhythm section, featuring  loose, Can-influenced drumming that’s recorded in an appealingly flat, Al Green style, and the kind of groovy basslines you might hear on Serge Gainsbourg or Scott Walker records. There’s also lots of old farfisa organs and junkshop keyboards, stylophone, sitar and other lightly psychedelic touches, all of which aid and support Soldevila’s wonderfully catchy songs. Musically, they’re unflaggingly upbeat but never saccharine, though lyrically it’s more of a breakup-and-moving-on record, and nearly every song could be a single. (This album also gets better on repeat listens.) I do wish there was a little more of the band’s funky side that reared its head on the EP, but we do get the fantastic “Endless Drive” (see her description of Anemone’s sound) that starts as a ballad, heads to the tropics and then goes into overdrive thanks to hyperactive vintage drum machine and layer upon layer of warm psychedelic touches. It’s the sound of pure bliss." - Brooklyn Vegan