When Good Things Happen to Bad Pianos

Album Review

2006's Songs from the Coalmine Canary was an abrupt departure from the dub-inflected dance-rock eclecticism of Little Annie's previous albums, a disc's worth of dramatic cabaret-style torch songs in the manner of a downtown hipster Edith Piaf produced by scene maven Anthony Hegarty. The follow-up, When Good Things Happen to Bad Pianos, takes the idea one step further: a collaboration between Little Annie and pianist Paul Wallfisch on nine vintage cover songs (plus one brief holiday-themed original at the end), this is torch singing in extremis. Little Annie's voice, never an instrument of beauty, sounds positively ravaged at times, recalling Broken English era Marianne Faithfull and Billie Holiday towards the end of her life. But there's an elegance and grace to her delivery, both on traditional examples of the form like "One for My Baby (And One More for the Road)" and Charles Aznavour's "Yesterday When I Was Young," and unexpected recastings like Tina Turner's "Private Dancer," which she turns into a wounded but proud meditation, and U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," which becomes almost unbearably tragic, sounding more like vintage Jacques Brel than the one Brel cover, "If You Go Away," does. Less of a shock than Songs from the Coalmine Canary, which was the sort of late-career reinvention that not many artists get to pull off, When Good Things Happen to Bad Pianos is an entirely worthy follow-up.