Bigger

AMG Review of Bigger

Thom Jurek
All Music Guide

On her second outing as a solo act, ex-Stickman Jones guitarist and vocalist Annie Quick issues her own alter record with Bigger: Ten Songs About Georgette. Georgette is the person who may be hiding inside the artist, she may be a collage of people she's encountered and been throughout her years on the planet, she may be simply the mirror image of Quick in a broken funhouse mirror of language and shadows. Whoever she is, she's got soul -- dirty, rough-hewn ock & roll soul. Bigger is a wild, woolly, dark as night, blast-it-out ock & roll album. You know the kind -- albums that people like PJ Harvey and Patti Smith and David Bowie (remember the guy who wanted to be Ziggy Stardust?) used to make, where the caterwaul of inner pain and the insistence on pleasure for its own sake as a kind of redemption were paramount to the expression of the artist's heart. As the guitars roar, scream, bleat, and peal through the mix into the stultified brain of the listener, Quick goes for the depths straightaway on "Fed Ex": "If you could Fed Ex my rejection to me/I could sign for my own failure...," or the sheer punched up strutted dare of "Hit Like a Man," where Georgette accuses a sucker who demands an even break: "...you could have failed in half the time/you could have been through half the hell..." as guitars cut razor-wired voodoo dolls in effigy, and a dirty-ass bass throbs through the bottom of the cacophony and threatens overload. Georgette doesn't spare anyone her burning, wasted poetic gaze, least of all her self:: Why haven't you given up what you haven't given up?/It must be something you're holding back/Give it up, give it up/Think of something else to sacrifice." But the deal is, nothing is held back by the Quick as Georgette, or Georgette as herself, or Georgette as Quick. It's all in the shapeshift of ock & roll. Everybody here is broken yet everybody here is strong or wants to be. Everybody wants to get over, but Georgette, though the mouth of Quick, knows that there is no getting over, there is just getting through: the wall, the glass, the scream, the undulating body of desire and disappointment, through the wailing, screeching guitars, basses, and drums. Bigger is ock & roll as catharsis to be sure, but it is also ock & roll as allegory, as theater, dream, and conversation, both inner and outer. In fact, this is ock & roll as the white-hot prayer for connection to something bigger than itself. Bigger is the first record in a long time that might actually mean something outside of its own frame of reference. Bring it on.