“Torn, to become whole again, after long seeking for what is lost,
The same cry from the tortoise as from Christ, the Osiris-cry of abandonment,
That which is whole, torn asunder,
That which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.”
(‘Tortoise Shout’ by DH Lawrence)

Torino-based experimentalists and kings of collaboration Larsen have come up with one of the surprise albums of the year, an oddly-inspiring mix of post-rock and dark electronica, recorded with veteran underground singer Little Annie ’Anxiety’ Bandez from New York. The result is a sort of claustrophobic lounge-jazz with menace. Imagine Lou Reed singing in some downtown Berlin bar backed by prog legends Can, possibly with Low-phase Bowie and Eno twiddling the knobs - Cool Cruel Mouth is surely the chilling ‘anti-hero’ soundtrack of the summer, and worth a listen for just sounding so different from anything else around.

Little Annie has been trampling on people’s delicate sensibilities for several decades now, poking around in The Big Apple’s cultural underbelly with her hysterical rants against suburban sterililty and conformity, like one of Henry Miller’s fact or fictional characters in ‘Tropic Of Cancer’. Short of inspiration, Frank Zappa famously recounts watching Annie And The Assexuals in the 80s struggling through their set at the legendary Max’s Kansas City Club, the perfect tonic from all the stiffs in LA and rich material for his next comic-strip band on ‘Joe’s Garage’ (Gorillaz take note please). Her voice has now mellowed from thorazine-induced shrieks to smoky contralto chanteuse, but the unsettling qualities are still there, and the story-telling on Cool Cruel Mouth is just that, very telling!

Annie’s talent is chameleon-like, and over the years she has worked with artists as diverse as Paul Sherwood (dub), Paul Oakenfold (club & house), as well as a great roster of avant-gardists, like anarcho-punks Crass, hard-electronica Coil and more recently Nurse With Wound. She recently settled with pianist Paul Wallfisch, and the duo put out a collection of songs last year, Genderful, and are touring with Baby Dee (who also appears here) and rather bizarrely, 80s legend Mark Almond.

If you believe life puts us on the same flight path for a reason, it’s easy to see how Larsen’s Cool Cruel Mouth might have come about, with their 15 years of creative output producing 13 albums so far, but very hard to find two alike. The band are happy to let mystery and fate intertwine, and often work with other musicians, their meandering and menacing cinematic-scope soundtracks lending themselves well to anybody with a story to tell, particularly an unsettling one.

So ‘It Was A Very Good Year’ turns the Frank Sinatra classic on its head, the Larsen-Annie version more a boozy trip down melancholia lane than anything nostalgic, sobered up ever-so-slightly by that ‘funeral’ piano accompaniment. Memories come flooding back from the bottom of the whisky glass, but are quickly put to bed for the last time, hopefully along with Robbie William’s awful cover with Ol’ Blue Eyes a few years ago. Hardly a radical re-interpretation, but the singer’s vulnerability set against the Larsen soundtrack, dark, creepy and atmospheric, sets the hairs-a-running. That ‘Hitchcock’ effect, that everything’s not as it should be, provides a perfect touchstone for the rest of the album.

Cool Cruel Mouth keeps us in the dark and stirs up as many ghosts as it lays to rest, but like a nice full-bodied red it deserves to be savoured drop-by-drop. Larson have staked out the territory in the two opening songs, but don’t imagine that it’s just more of the same, as Larsen build their soundtrack up layer by layer. ‘Dyslexic Haiku’ is largely instrumental, the post-rock guitar feedback and piano eventually joined at the end by some distant wailing noises. ‘Eyes’ has some wonderful trippy electric piano and odd grinding noises, and there are further atmospherics with a hypnotic drum sound on ‘These Are The Things’, evocative of Nico’s final art-rock flings on 1985′s Camera Obscura. The strange ambience on ‘Ohm Av. D’ is again joined by some voices-in-the-head chanting (the ghost of ‘Me & Mrs Jones’), and ‘Unheard Of Hope’ is a last-despairing gasp for love. ‘Viggo’ plays us out instrumentally and rather grandly, the epilogue is a post-rock signature, with Baby Dee on upright keyboard.

Beautiful enough, but step aside for the main feature, six-minute epic ‘Annie’s Rap’ with the singer regaling us of a doomed romantic liaison in a downtown bar on New York 34th street. “I like that in a man”, Annie raps continually, but somebody spiked the drinks as the story unravels, and the band play on, something like ‘The Gift’ from the Velvet Underground’s classic 1968 White Light/White Heat album, just without the macabre elements of Reed and Cale’s story. And the devil’s in the detail, the painful shoes that didn’t fit, the Chinese doll with the head to one side (or was it Japanese?), the flashing glances shot across the bar as she ‘steals’ a man, then the inevitable heartbreak … in Annie’s world, like the ’rap’ from DH Lawrence’s poem: “that which is whole, torn asunder”.

For ‘Annie’s Rap’ alone, I would recommend Cool Cruel Mouth. I haven’t heard an album as darkly compelling since Barry Adamson’s Oedipus Schmoedipus in 1996. While Adamson used a collection of vocalists to sketch out a troubled narrative of psycho-pathological complexes, Larsen’s approach has been to take one person who writhes around with many already inside her own head. Annie’s ‘Anxiety’ world is the one we fear the most, where life is breaking up in front of us, but like a musical soundtrack looped in the mind, we can either sink deeper into the ‘labyrinth’ of mental illness or reach for therapy … “that which is in part, finding its whole again throughout the universe.”