“I wanted to travel / Home into somewhere,” Ana Roxanne breathes across an eerie suspended drone on “The Age of Innocence.” “I wanted to try / And go very far.” These are the first words we hear on Poem 1, and they reintroduce an artist in a conspicuously different phase of her life than when Because of a Flower sprouted nearly six years ago. Heartbroken and reflective, Roxanne surveys the transformations that followed and displays a new‑found boldness: her voice is naked, vulnerable and alive, no longer shrouded in tape noise or looped and echoed beyond recognition beneath layered electroacoustic textures.
Across Poem 1, Roxanne steps forward as a singer‑songwriter in the classic sense, using limited instrumentation simply to accent her exposed tones. Reviewers repeatedly note how her vocals, previously elongated and half‑obscured within ambient soundscapes, now sit “front and centre,” revealing a “lovely, wispy voice in lucid detail.” Muted piano phrases and plucked bass notes languidly trail her anguished siren song on “Berceuse in A‑flat Minor, Op. 45,” making each word count, while the tense vibrato of strings in “The Age of Innocence” and the sustained piano notes in “Keepsake” heighten the sense of yearning. The arrangements are slow and spare, which only intensifies the emotional weight, their concentrated impact likened to the cruel dawn light in a Carl Dreyer film.
On “Keepsake,” she sounds as if she’s alone in an abandoned bar, brushing dust off the piano keys as she inventories her emotional scars. There’s a smell of old whisky in the air, but Poem 1 is a remarkably sober album: it never wallows in self‑pity. Instead, Roxanne finds catharsis in the logic of her expressions, twisting out the edges of her memories into surreal, cinematic asides. “Untitled II,” the album’s pronounced, uninhibited centerpiece, delivers on the Lynchian promise that’s been present since her first EP, 2019’s ~~~. Over a brushy, decelerated rhythm and funereal piano, she channels the teenage jazz‑singer self who “always picked the slowest, saddest songs” and arranged them “really slow and quiet” - her enduring vibe, now sharpened. Critics hear echoes of Beth Gibbons in its fierce fragility, a torch‑song atmosphere where Roxanne glances the edge of a hot spotlight, cutting through stage smoke with glassy evocations.
Her engagement with classical material further marks Poem 1 as a pivot. On “One Shall Sleep,” she interprets Robert Schumann’s lied “Stille Tränen,” turning Justinus Kerner’s words into a whispered echo of her own grief, narrating the 19th‑century poem over syrupy synthesizers and strings. As one reviewer notes, piano and classical references – from the berceuse title to Schumann – signal a noticeable shift toward art‑song and chamber‑pop territory. Yet Roxanne hasn’t severed ties with her ambient sensibilities: spellbound droniness still abounds on instrumental “X,” and the spoken‑word delivery of parts of “One Shall Sleep” recalls earlier work while trading haziness for clarity.
