Anna Kristina
…and Anna Kristina gets… three and quarter stars! Somehow she reminded me of a Star Search contestant. Her drummer even had the Yamaha drum set. Good ole Ed McMahon. How many out there had relatives who mailed back their million dollar sweepstakes entries religiously? My poor mom. She used to think she actually made it down to "1 in 10."
Anna Kristina, Anna Kristina, Anna Kristina. You can tire of her name rather quickly if you’re a reader of the ba.music newsgroup. Folks have voiced their frustration in having to sift through a load of messages from her management/record/whatever company, e-lan. With countless postings, the company has pissed off at least a few. And when newsgroup readers have expressed their frustration on-line, e-lan has made it a point to broadcast their responses, creating even more noise, always under the guise of "e-lan" rather than an actual person's name.
So enough about e-lan records. This review is supposed to be about Anna Kristina, and since I finally got out to see her (at the end of June at Bottom of the Hill), I should probably say a few things about her. She’s sexy and she's got great moves on stage. Oh, I suppose I should actually talk about her performance. Well, I'm not a big fan of her genre of music, so I probably shouldn’t be the one to comment on it, but hey, it’s too late.
Anna Kristina really does have a great voice and a lot of vocal range. She performs a high-energy set of dance-rock, and she doesn’t talk much between songs, which makes the experience sort of like a dance club. I guess it’s to keep people moving. At least it was refreshing to see an artist with original dance music. Otherwise, I would have had bad South Bay flashbacks. The crowd at Bottom of the Hill was considerably less than a packed house, but that didn’t seem to affect her. I got the impression that she loves to sing, loves to be on stage, and even loves to just hang out at the venue.
It was a pleasant surprise that Geoff Pearlman of Storm & Her Dirty Mouth was handling guitar duties for her. I must say he did a fine job of emulating her orgasmic moans with his guitar licks, err riffs, that is.
If you think you might be into this, you can check out Anna Kristina on July 21st at Mick’s Lounge, on Van Ness at Union. Who knows, maybe you’ll see Susan, our posthoc editor, there warming up for the Cher concert?
Steve Cefaratti
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