Homeland

Laurie Anderson has always been equally at home with pop music and experimentalism, and Homeland offers us the most satisfying synthesis of those two worlds since 1981's Big Science. Both albums marry personal, poetic composition with commentary on the issues of the day. Thirty years ago, she explored the role that technology was about to play in all our lives; now, she takes a broad sweep across the moribund Western approaches to economics, politics and the environment.

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Laurie Anderson’s Homeland originally started out as a “concert poem” that the legendary performance artist collaborated on with Lou Reed during her 2008 world tour—notably, this was also during the period of George W. Bush’s final months in office.

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Laurie Anderson's 40-year career bucks classification, incorporating performance art, music, spoken word, video, and more. To mention John Zorn, Lou Reed, and Philip Glass only glosses her collaborations with the American avant-garde. She's also crossed over in interesting and unexpected ways, whether voicing a singing tot in The Rugrats Movie, or hitting #2 on the 1981 UK Singles Chart with "O Superman (For Massenet)", a doomsday anthem combining the vocoder with an aria from Le Cid. That angelic, robotic voice is often reprised on Homeland, her first new album in a decade, which fans will welcome as an heir to her definitive performance piece, United States. It's also a perfect starting point; an exquisite state-of-the-union dispatch as only Anderson, America's darkly comic conscience, can provide.

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The first obvious joke on Laurie Anderson’s first proper record for the best part of a decade appears as you – if, indeed, this is how you treat your CDs – burn it onto iTunes. 'Laurie Anderson: Homeland: Pop' the screen announces. Now, Mrs Lou Reed (unless, that is, you consider Reed Mr Laurie Anderson) has been described as many djective- heavy, composite-noun-dependent things, her work many more. But pop music? Yes, her Massenet-meets-a-musical-robot masterpiece, ‘O Superman’, may have very nearly topped the UK charts in 1981, but it’s still something of a stretch, even accepting that in her cocktail of spoken-word melody and electronic illusion one can locate roots that grew into mainstream hits ranging from ‘Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)’ to Imogen Heap’s ‘Hide And Seek’.

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