There’s a cinema-style listing board above the front entrance to the Omeara. It simply reads “ANIKA”, and it’s all that takes to get me queuing on the sunny pavement well before doors.
I’ve been a fan of Anika for close to a decade now, first hearing her utterly singular voice covering The Pretenders’ ‘I Go to Sleep’. Paired with the urgent discordancy of its synths, the song embedded itself in my then-teenage psyche so deeply that the album it came from, Anika’s evergreen self-titled 2010 debut, could be identified in me like the inner trunk-rings of a tree. Her sophomore LP, Change came eleven years later, and the time passed had not un-dimmed the beautiful bleakness of the Anika sound – it remained engrossing to the point of consenting possession.
The name ‘Anika’ is a small veiling; Annika being her actual name, the removal of the second ‘n’ creates the slightest distance between life and project (a distance of the nth degree, ha-ha). It also invites the inclusion of her band into the stage name – a loving muddying of who’s who. Furthering this, her own bassist, Tomás Nochteff, is working a double shift as tonight’s support.
Of the now sadly disbanded Mueran Humanos, Nochteff cuts an imposing figure on the fogged-up red-lit stage of the Omeara. With just himself, a bass guitar, a drum machine and some loop-enabling pedals, he invokes an enormous sound. It’s minimalist but powerful, post-punk and angsty with all the potential energy of a wind-up punch, dark and hypnotically danceable. I’m an immediate convert.
Soon after, Anika appears on-stage. She’s wearing a black bomber jacket and black jeans, hand embroidered with white-threaded drawings and French phrases. The drawings appear like the geoglyphic chalk figures sometimes carved into grassy English hills, like the Cerne Abbas Giant in the dark night. When she sings, she leans from the very front edge, one leg forward, one back, over the crowd, as if being supported by string or magnets. She is a bridge from the little cavern of the stage to the listeners of the floor; the sound of her band can roll down and flood amongst us. Indeed, the crumbling ornery of the Omeara could very well have been weathered by the glorious abrasiveness of the guitars, a welcome sonic tidal erosion.
The set is the whole of her newest album, Abyss, in full. Many of the songs on Abyss utilise lyrical repetition, to multiple ends – some conjuring the sense of gritty determination, some fixed aggression, some self-reflection, grief and rumination. When performed these repetitions take on a darkly magical quality. And as if spellcasting, she is utterly locked into the words, tied to them, her movements synced to the stressing of syllables.
Between songs, Anika flits gracefully between solemnity and flippancy. ‘Honey’ is introduced with a sly quip: “This is called Honey. It’s about honey.” Another song is preceded by a sober wish for women’s rights, trans rights, and an end to the violence and destruction in Palestine and across the world. In this apparent dichotomy is a demonstration of how music can be both serious, pointed, rallying, and light-heartedly fun, neither use cancelling out the legitimacy or value of the other.
To rapturous applause, Anika concludes her set with an encore of two older songs – covers from that first self-titled release. The first is Yoko Ono’s ‘Yang Yang’, a call for revolution and peace. Its doomy, reverberating bass undulates throughout the whole track, and the guitar peals siren-like at intervals. The last is ‘I Go to Sleep’, played on guitar without her bandmates – a lullaby to end the night, she explains. It’s a beautiful rounding-off, sending us off softly into the warm late evening.
But quite the opposite of retiring to sleep, Anika and her band make a beeline into the queueing throng to staff their own merch table, greeting and signing and thanking and chatting.
