Strange Weather

This brief collection of covers by vocal powerhouse and guitarist Anna Calvi is made all the richer by her choice of songs, and by her partnering with David Byrne for two tracks. The first song, “Papi Pacify,” was originally by ethereal U.K. artist FKA Twigs; it’s as amorphous and mesmerizing as the original, with Calvi infusing her vocals with a bit more muscle. Her creeping, haunting, and not dissimilar take on singer Keren Ann’s piano-heavy “Strange Weather”—with Byrne’s wonderfully measured, restrained vocals—does justice to the deserving original, and her similarly unsettling version of “I’m the Man That Will Find You” is darkly sexy and far from the oddity of the Connan Mockasin original. David Bowie’s “Lady Grinning Soul” makes perfect sense for Calvi—she effortlessly reworks his dizzying waltz into an elegy, replacing the original’s grand sensibilities with introspective ones. Further evidencing her musical adventurism is the surprising take on early art-punkers Suicide’s “Ghost Rider,” where she spools out taut streams of guitar dissonance and semi-tortured vocal yelps that do the song right. Calvi is a real force.