Anna Minard claims to "know nothing about music." For this column, we force her to listen to random records by artists considered to be important by music nerds.

Black Woman
(Vortex)

So I just moved this week—you guys, moving is the worst. I'm kind of a pack rat and I hate organizing things, so the process of moving just feels like helplessly throwing up on myself over and over and then having to clean it up. Gross, embarrassing, and time-consuming. I was hoping to really bond with whatever music I listened to this week; it seemed like music I listened to while dismantling and re-mantling my life would be forged to my soul somehow. But I could not listen to Black Woman while packing, nor while cleaning, nor carrying boxes, nor finding where the hell that lamp shade went. It is not for such things.

The cover of Black Woman is so mesmerizing, so full of promise. That mascara! That tie! That hair! The first track sounded neat, a great rollicking warm-up of crazy mouth sounds and cymbals and tittering piano. Then it just... kept going. It wasn't a warm-up. It was the song. Okeydoke, I can get behind that. Who needs words? We're just going with a feeling here! I imagined Linda Sharrock shaking her head around, holding her hands out. And then that's it. For five minutes. Ohhh ohh, whoa, ay ay. All right!

Not a good soundtrack for the boxing and scrubbing of a life, though. Too shattering—I shelved it. So now I'm listening to it in a new apartment in the dark, sipping brandy neat out of a jam jar. The moon is so bright it has a corona of white clouds; freshly Windexed glass and the smell of cardboard make everything seem promising and hopeful. The music is like a comb of needles dragging lightly across my skin—disturbing, not quite painful, a little ticklish.

Track two is "Peanut," and it sounds like instruments telling each other jokes or just chatting on a porch somewhere. They go in fits and starts, never making a whole song, stopping for a second after every burst. Sometimes they sound like they know one another, sometimes they're awkward, muttering acquaintances. The guitar line crumples on itself; the drums get offended. She cries out again, long and loud, strong—then anguished. This sounds like it belongs in The Big Lebowski, like Maude would like it.

The last track, "Portrait of Linda in Three Colors, All Black," is mostly wailing, some screaming. I know there are instruments, but I can't stop listening to her yelps. They are jarring and knock me off balance. I can't tell if her shrieks are the sounds of sex, torture, or jazz. Maybe those are more related than I thought?

I asked Dave Segal what the fuck all this is. He called it an "unconventional singing style." Understatement of the century.

I give this a "Sonny Sharrock: It's Not Sonny and Cher" out of 10.