Homeland

The album comes as a thirty-six page hardbound book with a CD and DVD. The DVD contains "Laurie's Violin" (7:22), where Laurie plays and talks about the violin, and "Homeland: The Story of the Lark" (41:27), an art documentary broken up into sixteen chapters. Homeland contains some of Laurie Anderson's most incisive work - darkly humorous, starkly emotional, and, at times, movingly tender. Her stories are once again about these United States of America, the sprawling subject that first brought her acclaim more than twenty-five years ago with her eight-hour Reagan era phantasmagoria, United States, Parts I - IV. Homeland is a distilled, up-to-the-minute portrait of our agitated nation, its politics, its economics, its delusions and its dreams. Her tone is less outraged than elegiac, mourning for lives lost, ideals misplaced. The music is dramatically stripped down to a handful of players, centered around Anderson's haunting violin and voice, frequent Bill Frisell band-mate Eyvind Kang's viola and Peter Scherer's keyboards. The arrangements are embellished with such touches as the siren-like vocals of Antony Hegarty (of Antony and the Johnsons), thumping keyboards from Keiran Hebden (of Four Tet), and, on the brilliant, wickedly funny "Only An Expert," a gnarly guitar turn from Anderson's husband and co-producer Lou Reed.

Homeland, long awaited in recorded form, has evolved over more than two years of touring as Anderson developed the songs in front of concertgoers around the world, from downtown clubs in Manhattan to an amphitheatre in Athens, Greece. In Artforum, Anderson summarized the songs as "one-third politics, one-third pure music, and one-third strange dreams." On the road, Homeland drew acclaim and attracted controversy for its political content. But Anderson is not merely criticizing or complaining; on tracks like the stunning eleven minute album centerpiece, "Another Day in America," Anderson is really singing for our survival, retelling the stories of our present state in the most forthright material of her career. It can be harrowing but it can be hopeful, and it is as riveting as anything Anderson has produced since the groundbreaking Big Science in 1982.