(Kscope)The Welsh multi-instrumentalist navigates a small battalion of sorrows on this richly wrought second album
As a drawn-to-the-dark teen, the Welsh singer-songwriter Catherine Anne Davies, AKA the Anchoress, subscribed to the notion that great art must be born of pain. Recent times brought her unwelcome opportunity to thoroughly test the theory: the death of her father, the loss of several pregnancies, and a cervical
cancer diagnosis. Her second album dramatises the fight to pull some meaning clear.
The slinky, thunking Unravel shifts its rhythms under your feet, as stabbing strings and drowning-deep Cure guitars pursue Davies through sleepless nights. “How much more can she take?/ One more child/ One more rape” asks the title track, amid tumbling drums and sci-fi synths. Death often comes tangled in other kinds of, specifically female, trauma here: The Exchange, a duet with Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield, evokes the fray of a fraught, unhealthy relationship, while Show Your Face summons the spectre of abuse and harassment, With the Boys that of industry misogyny.