LANGUAGE BARRIER
(Churchkey Records/SugarQube Records)
Shirlette Ammons plays The Pinhook Saturday, Feb. 6, at 10 p.m. Tickets are $10.
The voice of Shirlette Ammonssoft in a warm Southern way but somehow toughened by both experience and enthusiasmarrives just two seconds into Language Barrier, the emcee’s first album in five years. “Yeah,” she says defiantly, stepping over corkscrew bass and electroclash guitars. “Some say life is a bitch/I say that bitch is a diva.” Ammons continues to hold court for the next two minutes, delivering the sophisticated verbal tangles of her “Earth Intro Segue” with a confessional candor. It’s as if she’s still parsing the meaning of the words she has written. After the big, bludgeoning beat has decayed for the final time, Ammons’s voice is all that remains for the song’s final seconds. “The matter is with the facts,” she closes, her voice settling into resignation after a masterful prelude.
But then, just like that, Ammons and her velveteen voice disappear for the bulk of Language Barrier. She slips like a guest, or a ghost, into a project that bears her name.
On Language Barrier‘s remaining nine tracks, Ammons yields the microphone to a panoply of high-profile guestsboth Indigo Girls and Hiss Golden Messenger’s Mike Taylor, Sylvan Esso’s Amelia Meath and Justus League alumnus Median. Ammons wrote the lyrics and crafted the teeming, dynamic backing tracks with multi-instrumentalist Daniel Hart. She then, by and large, passed the microphone, rejoining to trade a self-liberating verse with German rapper Sookee or to shout out the chorus of the bewildering and irrepressible title track alongside Mount Moriah’s Heather McEntire. Rather than serve as the mouthpiece for her own material, Ammons has chosen to become its spine, connecting the limbs of this strange, gangly body.
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