Sweet Mortality

Sweet Mortality is not a posthumous solo album from the first woman to survive a trip down Niagara Falls, but it is at times nearly as fun as freefalling inside a barrel. Taking their name from an unlikely early 20th century American adventuring legend, Annie Taylor are a rock band from Zurich, Switzerland with a pleasantly crunchy grunge-meets-psych-pop feel. Formed in 2017 by singer/guitarist Gini Jungi and bassist Michael Mutter, the group issued a pair of fuzzed-out singles before recruiting guitarist Tobias Arn and drummer Jan Winkler for their 2019 EP Not Yours! Now signed to Zurich indie Taxi Gauche Records, they offer up their first full-length album. Produced by David Langhard of fellow Swiss explorers Klaus Johann Grobe, Sweet Mortality is a still-wily though better-formed encapsulation of Annie Taylors reigning grunge aesthetic with detours into dark pop, garage, and psychedelic textures. Overall less dirge-like than their noisy EP, the album benefits from some hooky, pop-driven standouts like Drive, A Thousand Times, and Words, which emphasize Jungis sweet and sour vocals and innate melodic sense. There are also a handful of rousing cuts like Telephone and She Loves You No More that take their riffy cues more from 70s hard rock and punk than the grunge of the 90s. In Jungi, Annie Taylor have an enigmatic frontwoman with plenty of attitude and as a whole, the band manage to tread the line between raw thump and tight arrangements quite well on their first major outing. ~ Timothy Monger