Album Review: Anne by Joseph Shabason

Formed around interviews he conducted with his mother, and based on how she views herself through the lens of her Parkinson's disease, at its core, the second album from Destroyer/DIANA saxophonist and electronic composer Joseph Shabason is an extremely personal rumination on the fragility of life.   But there's a persistent thermal capacity to the work, delivering that experience while avoiding any clichéd representations of illness and finding relief in what the present is able to provide.   More outwardly expressive and ….

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Though he's only begun releasing music under his own name recently, Toronto saxophonist Joseph Shabason has already used his horn to flesh out two of the decade's best experimental rock albums. He played a key role on the War on Drugs' 2014 breakthrough Lost in the Dream, but his greatest impact can be heard three years earlier on Destroyer's masterpiece Kaputt. Frontman Dan Bejar had largely completed his soft-rock opus before asking Shabason to improvise over the recordings, where his ghostly saxophone lines proved to be the perfect complement to Bejar's alternately hedonistic and weary narrator, hanging over every story like a heavy cologne.

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There's nothing more heartbreaking than having to watch a loved one suffering from debilitating illness and it's probably one of the more difficult things we eventually face in life. Equally difficult are the all the emotions that come with the process and also having to make the kinds of choices we often aren't prepared to make. There's no real set way of coping with these situations either, and we find ourselves seeking temporary relief from just about anything we can possibly turn to.

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