Album Review: Live at Glasshaus by Annahstasia
Annahstasia turned a Brooklyn studio into a confessional booth and forgot to install the partition. She rarely writes lyrics down, proving she didn’t need to, and it sounds memorized by the body.
Three months after releasing Tether, her debut full-length and the truest version of herself she’d committed to tape, Annahstasia walked into a Brooklyn studio called Glasshaus with a chamber ensemble and sang those same songs over again for a hundred strangers. Aaron Liao, her musical director, had rearranged the material from live voice memos she’d been collecting, scraps of melody and cadence caught mid-thought, mid-afternoon, and rebuilt them for cello, flute, clarinet, soprano saxophone, Rhodes, Prophet synth, two guitars, upright bass, and drums. The live LP that came out of that September night carries no studio safety net. There’s a banjo on some of these tracks, an organ on others. When her voice bends, it bends into open air, and the hundred guests hold it or it falls.
Half the record asks for something by name. “Take Care of Me” opens with an order:
“Take off your shirt
I need to see if you’re made of clay and dirt.”
And then confesses why. She’s porcelain sitting on someone’s highest shelf, about to fall without their help. She says “before anyone” five times running, and each round sheds a word until it’s bare demand, stripped of context. “Satisfy Me” pushes further in the other direction. Two words, no explanation, no backstory, just the refrain hammering the same imperative over and over. She heard through the grapevine that someone wasn’t having a good time, and instead of offering comfort, she needs to know where they went wrong, whether they had the answers all along. The second verse pins it, as she sees clearly on the outside looking in. She dreams freely because she’s never really all that satisfied.
Annahstasia tells someone on “Stress Test” that she built them wooden houses to store their dreams, then burned them all down just to see them come outside. That’s the entire proposition. She’s searching through their universe for signs of life, and the chorus tallies the cost. Down the middle, same weight, just a little while she breaks, you’re getting in either way. The cut closes with her repeating “I’m inside you” with the patience of someone already past the argument. “Sunday” wagers something quieter. “Maybe in a different timeline/I was the perfect girl for you,” she sings, and “Saturday” drops the ambiguity altogether. Every line is a want. The one you call in the afternoon, the one on the cutting edge, the one that gets you out of bed. Then, buried between all that devotion, she tells the person they’re not even the heaviest stone she’s thrown. If you give me your hours, I’ll trade yours for mine. “Evergreen” begins as a pact between two people splitting up the emotional labor, you be simple and I’ll be blind, you be gentle and I’ll be kind, and by its final minute she’s shouting “I’m always on your mind/I’m wasting your time,” the reassurance curdled into accusation, the same phrases doing completely different work.
“Untamed” reaches for something older and angrier than any of the love cuts. She wants the freedom of a boy unchained, the freedom to run around with her hair wild, stark as the night, no fear of hallowed ground. She wants the freedom of a man, to take as he demands, to take whatever he can. Chest bare in the blistering sun, naked as the day she arrived, no fear of a wandering eye. “I haven’t asked for much,” she says twice, and the restraint in those five words against the size of what they carry is the whole tension. Then “to take what he demands, to take whatever he can” starts building, repeating, getting louder, growing teeth. “Villain” works the opposite nerve where they all built on the same command: take it, take it back. Take back the doubt and the insecurity you put in me. Take back the anger and fury. Take back this single-judging-jury mentality. Take back this life and memory, because she still hears a voice inside her head calling her the villain of the story.
She and Obongjayar wrote “Slow” huddled around a single ribbon microphone in a London Airbnb living room, eyes locked, and the recording carries that closeness. But for Glasshaus, it’s her time. “Time breeds time/And violence breeds more silence,” she begins, and then asks where they are, because this isn’t heaven, so where is she going. The hook doesn’t pretend to know:
“So where do we go from here
It’s not our job to know
I heard it on the wind
To go slow.”
For “Unrest,” it shares that refusal to settle: “Why worry when the sky didn’t fall in/The moon still sets and the sun still rises.” She offers all the evidence that nothing is wrong, your hands still feel my skin, our eyes still touch, and then she names the thing that won’t leave: “It’s the same unrest/Sitting in my chest.”
In her discography, “Be Kind” is the most furnished track she’s recorded and hearing it on a live setting proves it. There’s a pile of CDs in the corner sharing the ground with a tree. A ghetto diamond catches her eye, rare and different. She danced for three days in the arms of a lover she met in the growing phase, who held on through her growing pains. She deserves to rest in a California king bed with her arms outstretched and her dreams bleeding from her head into the sheets. She might be the chosen one, someone’s lost and rambling son, and she’ll leave them standing in a land she deserted for a better hand. They’re the furniture of a life she’s inviting you to walk through. The deal comes in the chorus, then the condition flips.
“Don’t make me care less
Don’t make me heartless.”
She admits it flat on “Believer”: “You make my life harder/Why can’t you be easier on me.” She needs them to believe in all her possible possibility, but every round she wins they turn the wrong way. She wanted them in her arms to celebrate a long day. Maybe she can’t take them all the way, and does that mean she’s only loyal if they stay the same? Then the gut of the cut cracks wide:
“I get lonely
And I know you get lonely too
Can I be lonely here with you?”
She confesses she’s a better dreamer than a friend sometimes, that she only wants to play pretend sometimes, but she needs them to believe she’s trying her very best. “Don’t write me off like all the rest.” And then “Can I be lonely here with you?” comes back, ten, twelve, maybe fifteen rounds, the question filling the Glasshaus, the hundred people sitting inside it, the song not finishing so much as continuing past the point where anyone could answer.
Great (★★★★☆)