My lips will come to kiss you
Anyway
The greedy worm will find your heart…
Ahhh…feel my creature
And….be my rambler
There are artists who drift restlessly, never content to sit in the safety of a single genre. Sylvia Black is one such figure, moving like a wayward star across constellations of music, always refracting a different light. Her latest release, a reimagining of OTO’s cult 1980s single “Anyway,” feels less like a cover and more like a séance; a call across decades, summoning forgotten ghosts of coldwave Europe and giving them flesh anew.
Black’s career has always been errant, untidy in the best way: writing for others, leading lounge bands that turned punk into velvet, backing Lydia Lunch or Maya Rudolph, ghosting in the shadows of more visible names. But here she is front and centre, her taste for drama undeniable. She speaks of hearing ‘Anyway’ at a Halloween party in New Orleans, a night when the song clawed its way into her memory. That image stays with you; a track born in the continental underground of the ‘80s, resurrected decades later in the arms of a masquerade.
Black does not enter the song timidly. She steps into its bones with composure, then layers them in a new costume: synths glazed in frost, a bassline that moves with measured inevitability, and saxophone notes that curl like smoke from an abandoned cabaret. The result is poised, decadent, a portrait of a ballroom caught between ruin and glamour. It is a faithful, if slightly unnerving, rendition.
Joseph Keckler, her co-conspirator here, adds a voice as rich as velvet, theatrical yet deliberate, circling Black’s own delivery with his trademark operatic lure. Together, their performance becomes something both ritualistic and intoxicating, as though two performers are holding court in a dim-lit theatre where the audience leans forward, uncertain if they are witnessing a mating ritual…or a demonic possession.
The production is generous with space. Instead of rushing, it allows the song to sprawl, to breathe. Within that room Black plays with texture, layering voices, sax, and synths until the track swells with a decadent melancholy that never slips into parody. It is sincere, almost devotional, an offering to the past that insists upon the present.
Listen to “Anyway” below and order the single here.
This release is a harbinger of Shadowtime, Black’s forthcoming album. If Anyway is any indication, the record will be less an artifact of nostalgia than a living communion; a reminder that in the dim recesses of underground music, old songs do not die, they simply wait for someone daring enough to beckon their return to the land of the living (or the lost).
For a refresher – or an introduction – here is the original track by OTO:
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