Anohni, Park Avenue Armory, review: Antony and the Johnsons singer addresses politics from behind a veil

Anohni performs her new electronic pop album Hopelessness, tackling Obama, war, global surveillance and climate change, alongside Hudson Mohawke and Oneohtrix Point Never. The show reaches the UK this summer

Were it not for Anohni’s beguiling voice, ghostly and wringing with emotion, her presence would have been barely noticeable

After 15 years of creating orchestral balladry as Antony and the Johnsons, Anohni’s new album Hopelessness represents a striking reinvention. Not only is her introverted gaze turned outwards at a range of lofty, specified targets (Barack Obama, war, global surveillance, climate change) but the sound best exemplified on her 2005 Mercury prize winning album I Am a Bird Now is rejected entirely. Fashioned with a pair of alternative electronic producers – Kanye West cohort Hudson Mohawke and Warp Records’ Oneohtrix Point Never – Hopelessness veers from austere electronica to accessible electronic pop and back again.

Presented live for the first time across two nights at the Red Bull Music Academy in New York, the full extent of Hopelessness’s unflinching revulsion is laid bare. To emphasise this is a record with a message, the show’s programme comes with full lyric sheet and the rallying cry “don’t shy away”, as if that were possible even for those inclined to do so. From the moment an introductory video featuring model Naomi Campbell dancing seductively to intermittent washes of white noise begins, a sense of unease is palpable. Mesmeric yet ominous, it sets the tone: by the time Oneohtrix Point Never and Bjork collaborator Christopher Elms take to laptops at the far sides of the stage, it becomes clear, in keeping with Anohni’s past, tonight will use visual art to communicate the universality of her uncomfortable truth.

Were it not for Anohni’s voice, still as beguiling a weapon as ever, ghostly and wringing with emotion, her presence would have been barely noticeable. She sings opener “Hopelessness” from behind the stage and when she does appear in a hooded white robe to sing the pounding climate change anthem “4 Degrees”, her face is covered with a black veil. As the critical “Obama” rumbles on through a swathe of feedback, she turns her back on the audience completely.

Instead, a series of women from the art world, predominantly black and ethnic minority, are projected in profile onto the big screen. They in effect become the conduit to Anohni’s emotions: they mime the words to each track, evocatively so, as the music’s skittish beats (“Execution”) and throbbing bass (“Watch Me”) swamp the hall. It is unconventional and precocious, but utterly entrancing.

The last notes of closer “Drone Bomb Me” barely had chance to escape before contemporary artist Ngalangka Nola Taylor is shown on screen. “What is going on with the world?” she asks despairingly. The question wrenches the gut, in keeping with the unsettling, confrontational yet vital hour Anohni spent addressing that very concern.

For more information on Red Bull Music Academy and the New York Festival visit http://www.redbullmusicacademy.com/