Goth and synth-pop legend Annie Hogan yields a gorgeously unexpected new album of smouldering chamber dirges suffused with a damaged, downbeat energy that’s quite distinct from anything else in her five years of work with Downwards, the label run by Regis – RIYL Rowland S. Howard, Jonnine, Leonard Cohen, John Duncan, Leslie Winer, Mark Lanegan, The The.

On »Tongues in My Head« Hogan naturally slips into a style of eerie reverie that effortlessly steers her celebrated piano & keyboard chops into deeply woozy, swaying styles of downbeat songcraft. Recorded in mostly single takes, with Annie playing an array of instruments and just her recording engineer for company, the poised and bittersweet songs here betray a near half-century of close work alongside some of contemporary music’s greatest troubadours, with a timeless grasp of haunting melody and elegant slow-burn arrangements. It clearly marks a switch from the atmospheric sorcery of much of her recent work, turning to intimate presentations of voice and wheezing electronics wreathed into a beautifully wilting bouquet.

At a near deathly heart rate, Annie attends to her most gothic, romantic urges with a dose of heavy blooz that slowly colour proceedings. Stark drum machine backbones slowly measure the pace of a detuned, prepared piano iced with her steady but shivering vocal presence. It’s one to get wrapped right up inside, opening with wistfully cinematic keys, strings, and a soulful shuffle reminiscent of Barry Adamson in »Alles int Veloren«, and keening ever so gently from the screwed chamber folk of »Deadly Night Shadow« to dwell on common obsessions in »Death Rituals«, with a northern gothic appeal shades away from Dickon Hinchliffe’s Red Riding OST.

It’s not hard to hear the pall of Nick Cave loom in the sustained low-end keys of »Safe Hands« (co-written with Karl O’Connor, who provides the lyrics), obscured by Annie’s coarse patina of bittersweet distortion, while closer »The Conjurer« most subtly weaves her atmospheric alchemy into a sort of dusty modal dirge, where all her colours bleed into a blue-brown as deep as the Mersey, just beyond her studio.

A quiet triumph.