DustFour tracks and a handful of instruments make up ‘Dust’, the debut EP from Dublin-based Anna Jordan. It is a piano-heavy work but what is surprising is how very different the four tracks are from each other, suggesting Anna’s goal with this release was more about experimentation than creating a singular listening experience. It does feel very much like she is trying to pinpoint her own musical identity here.

The opening track Dust is a fairly standard interaction between piano and percussion that is pleasant enough, but after a couple of listens becomes the easiest method of explaining what is wrong with the EP. Piano at times can come across as a very cold instrument, and when coupled here with Anna’s rather thin high register and the measured beat of the drums, it simply fails to hit any kind of emotional tone at all. Formally the song builds a bit like an LCD Soundsystem track but is not quite as inventive.

Air That You Breathe is all of that and more. It’s got a more sturdy tone than the previous track, with a jazz-style off-key instrumentation evoking a gothic mood, but the emotional level it’s going for seems dishonest. The lyrics create a wonderfully vivid landscape of unsettling imagery, but they never give any insight into why the tone is so depressive, besides the obvious journey-into-madness overtones it’s got going on. The warm tones of the saxophone or the trumpet that this style was created for are replaced by the forbidding sounds of the piano and the viola, making it so you feel like you’re bouncing off the music rather than being embraced by it. It’s interesting on an artistic level but isn’t the type of track you’ll find yourself returning to.

A glorious change in tone, or finding of tone, occurs with She Dances. Loops are used to introduce more and more sounds that seem to go on and on, and if you’ve started tapping your feet and nodding your head after one minute of it you’ll be dancing after five. The song breaks spectacularly through the cloud of semantics that oppresses so many artists and instead aims for the unspeakable. The vocal loop that comes in is the greatest possible expression of this idea, like a dreamy alternative to Little Richard’s howling “A-wop-bom-a-loo-mop-a-lomp-bom-bom”.

Anna also makes great use of her voice’s different tones on this song when she sings at different registers and volumes. The high thin sound that dominates Dust becomes another instrument, where her natural whispery singing voice comes to the forefront and just adds to a song that would be great anyway. The final track Silent Sea is the one that makes it obvious that this EP is not meant to be a complete listening experience, because after the joy of She Dances it returns to the heavily depressive sound of Air That You Breathe, this time in the form of a piano ballad. It’s a well-written song in a standard style but after She Dances it feels even more dramatically downbeat, so you’re still wondering what is so sad?

If this EP is indeed an experiment for Anna to find her musical voice then the question of “why these overly grave songs?” arises. If there is an honest source behind it that doesn’t come across in these songs then she needs to address it directly, otherwise she needs to cut it loose because the accessibility and beauty of She Dances is nothing if not a genuine musical success on every level.