Annie Hardy - Rules

Pitchfork 73

The first image most people saw of Annie Hardy was a striking one: A young woman in a striped polo with her lips slightly upturned, holding a steak knife poised over her thigh. It was the cover image for her band Giant Drag’s 2005 debut Hearts and Unicorns, and that idea, the innocent with murderous intent, was a pretty good reflection of what you would find inside the jewel case. Twelve years on, the same the woman looking into the camera in 2017 wears darker lipstick, more elaborate outfits, and a world-weary demeanor. Rules, her first solo album, captures the manic energy that made Giant Drag so exhilarating while infusing it with more depth.

About five years ago, at 30, Hardy’s years as a rock hellion had dimmed; Because her relationship with her partner Robert Paulson was stable, she gave up music. Quickly, it all unraveled. Seventeen days after her son Silvio was born, he died of SIDS. About a year later, Paulson died of a drug overdose. The trauma of such a loss often incapacitating: they’re gone, so there isn’t much you can do.

In need of a release, Hardy gravitated back to her guitar after Silvio’s death, and the songs she wrote coalesced into a project after Robert’s. Her grief is palpable here, but Rules doesn’t bob in the wake of tragedy, it is as angry as it is mournful. Part of this is due to her distinctive voice: equal parts Loretta Lynn and Lydia Lunch, her sultry caterwaul is severely emotional. In angry moments, she can scream a lyric; in somber ones, her voice cracks timorously. On “Shadow Mode,” the record’s centerpiece of rage, she does both when she delivers this couplet: “I scream like a willow out on the shore/‘Where is this man? He comes no more!’” The line is simple enough to serve as a vehicle for pure sensation.

The punk of some of her backing musicians populates the margins; crashing like Dan Bolles of the Germs on the drums or boozy like Stephen McBean’s Pink Mountaintops. But due to her songwriting, the organs and the riffs, the songs are more like country torch songs than punk per se. Country funk-influenced first single “Want” transforms a pretty standard pop trope (“I want my baby back”) into a pendulous primal yelp for her child. She walks a line between naive simplicity and ambiguous spirituality.

Like the blues music her songs recall, an undertone of gospel sneaks through, and it’s probably the biggest departure from her work with Giant Drag. More than a few songs sound like hymnals you can imagine hearing in a very alternative church. This interest in spirituality culminates on the song “Jesus Loves Me,” a thin ballad, like the Velvet Underground, that features a tender violin line from That Dog’s Petra Haden. The song concerns a skeptic’s favorite argument, the idea that Jesus loves everyone but most people’s lives are pretty awful. At its climax, she yelps “Revelations 3:19,” perhaps the strangest implication of bible verse since Stone Cold Steve Austin took on John 3:16. The verse reads, in the King James, “As many as I love, I rebuke and chasten: be zealous therefore, and repent.” She’s sorry for the things she’s done, but she's aware that it’s not really her fault.

Out of unspeakable grief, Annie Hardy made a seriously profound album while holding onto her peculiarities. Even the silence between the songs is impressive. Its most haunting refrain is a “But it’s all right” she repeats throughout “Mockingbird,” one of the songs that refers directly to her son’s death. It’s difficult to believe, but on Rules she does the unimaginable job of turning that rotten fruit into dark wine.