Track Listing

1. Not Going Anywhere
2. Polly
3. Road Bin
4. End of May
5. Sailor & Widow
6. Sit in the Sun
7. Right Now & Right Here
8. Seventeen
9. Spanish Song Bird
10. By the Cathedral
11. Ending Song

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #66419 in Music
• Released on: 2004-08-24
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .21 pounds

Amazon.com
There's something foreign, and disturbing about Keren Ann Zeidel's fourth album. The Israeli native doesn't so much sing, as inhabit her moody compositions, creating haunting soundscapes that are as unsettling as they are beautiful, lingering in the memory long after you've put the CD back into its case. The multi-instrumentalist combines a hushed fragility with a fierce poetic austerity--with odd, truncated, inner rhymes--beginning with her rather severe confessional "Not Going Anywhere," to the ghostly specter and strategic awkwardness of "End of May" extending throughout the eleven songs that make up this disquieting collection. The chanteuse has abandoned her former trip-hop posturing that earned her early comparisons to Beth Orton and Portishead's Beth Gibbons, and instead has adopted an almost hesitant fatalism that chills the listener to the bone. --Jaan Uhelszki

Customer Reviews

One of a kind
"Not Going Anywhere" is Keren Ann's 3rd record, Her first in English. The first to get a US release. And it's about time.
As the Israeli - French artist is one of the best singer-songwriters in the world today. Her delicate singing, is strong and powerful as if she was screaming. A perfect writer, Keren Ann molds her songs like little sad diamonds and then adds a lot by whispering them to your ear.
Think a modern Francoise Hardy, with a touch of nick Drake.
If you loved Joni Mitchel and Suzan Vega, If you adore Damien Rice, Rufus Wainwright and Tom Mcrae, if you went to see Simon and Garfunkel live this summer - Keren Ann is your next best friend.
Get her before the hype.
She is the new Nora Jones minus the Nutrasweet.

Definitely Going Somewhere
The first English-language recording from Keren Ann is sure to elicit comparisons to Francoise Hardy, but there's more of an English folksinger/bossa nova vibe to her Blue Note debut, like Astrud Gilberto singing the Nick Drake songbook. Her voice is delicate, yet sure; the arrangements intricate, yet spare. Some may miss the electronic textures of previous albums, "La Biographie de Luka Philipsen" and "La Disparition", but Keren Ann sounds more like herself now, less like a French Beth Orton. When foreign artists sign to American record companies and start singing in English, it's usually the kiss of death, but this is Keren Ann's best record yet.

Incomparable
There's no one like Keren Ann - in this century anyway. Her singing style might be best described as "softspoken", pun intended, but the overall effect is mesmerizing, soothing... I slightly prefer "Nolita" over this effort, that CD is darker, haunting, but this is also very very good. The title track, with its ironic but key "This is why I always whisper" lyric (it really is like listening to a whisper to a scream) sets the tone and the rest of the disc just sails along. Other standout tracks that keep the mellow spell intact - By The Cathedral, Polly, Sit In the Sun... heck, theyre all good, if in pretty much the same mode (except Sailor & Widow, which seems destined for an off-Broadway musical somewhere).

Having seen her live I got the feeling I was in Paris in 1935, listening to a sexy lounge singer coo her way through a series of unfamiliar torch songs, accompanied by an antique guitar, a piano, a french horn and 2 strings. That description might not sound all that great, but somehow, in todays world of WT hip-hop and screaming death metal, it really, really works.

Keren Ann is a talented musician who definitely has carved a niche of her own in the music landscape.