Album review: Laurie Anderson, Homeland

FOR A performer who keeps her artistic gaze trained on the American condition, it has been an eventful nine years since Laurie Anderson last released an album. Homeland does an admirable part-satirical, part-philosophical job of dissecting the 21st-century blues – war, terrorism, fiscal collapse, all the usual fun.

Witty electro funk single Only An Expert – dry as a desert and garnished with guitar squall courtesy of her other half, Lou Reed – is a standout. But rather than deliver the protracted treatise Another Day In America in her own detached, slightly unnerving tones, Anderson turns it over to her male alter ego Fenway Bergamot by making alienating use of drawling pitch-shifted vocals – an effect forever associated (in my mind, anyway) with the Will Powers' novelty hit Kissing With Confidence.