"Here comes the train to take my baby away."
It's a lyric as old as any mournful blues song, but this hook to Annie Hardy's new single, "Train," is riven with loss.
Hardy, as fans of her old band Giant Drag may now know, has endured incomprehensible personal pain over the last few years, losing both her newborn baby Silvio to SIDS and her partner, Robert Paulson, to an overdose just a year later.
Songwriting was the one thing to pull her out of that miasma of grief, and "Train" is one of her most plainspoken expressions of raw pain. Half of it is lost in a reverbed fog of memory and disconnection, the other have is ruptured by feedback so intense it feels like physical illness.
Given Hardy's giddily vulgar past rock projects, this deeply-wounded vulnerability makes "Rules" one of the bravest and most harrowing local albums of the year.
