Anthony Family - Live From An Ordinary Place (2025) [Hi-Res]

There are two tracks on Live From An Ordinary Place that are worth highlighting before speaking on the album as a whole. The first is (thirtyseven), a voicemail from Anthony Anzaldo’s mother wishing him a happy birthday, while referring to herself as his “mommy” and his “birth-giver”, and circling the drain of goo-goo-eyed cringe so much that if any normal person’s parent spoke to them like this, they’d be tempted to cut them off entirely. The other is Nothing Something Everything Onemorething, whose entire lyrical sheet is its title repeated a couple of times over, and yet, according to Anzaldo, “the song with the least amount of words is the one with the most complex and all encompassing point of view”.

The reason that these are worth bringing up in isolation is because they’re both perfect little melds of Live From An Ordinary Place’s utterly incapacitating faults. Here’s an album that believes and hopes against hope that it’s more than a mere side-project, with nothing to show for it outside of oblique pseudo-‘depth’. ‘Pretentious’, too, is an apt descriptor, for as overused as the term has become. It’s not like it wouldn’t fit for Anzaldo’s perceived role of sophistipop romantic versus darkwave stentor, convinced of a greatness without the joy or warmth to make it feel welcoming. Truly, the vainest of vanity projects.