Author(s): Yorke Thom

vinyl

ANIMA’s engagement with electronic dance music serves a dual thematic purpose. The first is obvious: most of these sounds are generated by computers, an appropriately rigid and synthetic palette for an album about the confusion and loss of self that a life mediated by screens can easily bring about. (“Goddamn machinery, why don’t you speak to me?” Yorke mutters in one of the album’s few inelegant moments, to open the hair-raisingly dense Luddite fantasy “The Axe.”) The second purpose is subtler. By arranging these sounds into patterns that may drive your limbs into spontaneous motion—on tracks that, for all their icy remove, contain the suggestion of actual dancing—ANIMA offers one possible way out of the nightmare. It recognizes and makes use of dance music’s singular ability to remind you that you live in a body, and that it feels profoundly good to put your body next to lots of others, all moving in time to a single unifying pulse.