Album Review: Giver Taker by Anjimile

It's this bare essence that carries Boston's Anjimile Chithambo's debut Giver Taker, where the energy broods, and in its very nature there's an understanding that giving and taking go hand in hand. From material objects being passed around to the loss of a person offering up a changed outlook, in between every plucked string and natural rhythm lies the possibility of your journey to undertake, the split-second spaces are little breaths in a larger scheme that adds up to something greater than its parts. Wailing down the hallowed halls of memory and experience, Chithambo feels the resonation of these moments and channels the hurt through extraordinary delicate songs where harmonies wrap around each other with a spectral quality, and the dripping rain of picked guitar strings decorate the walls taking leaves from the book of Sufjan Stevens .

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Boston-based singer-songwriter Anjimile Chithambo's life changed when they realized they could rebuild themself. Born in a Dallas suburb to conservative, Presbyterian immigrants from Malawi, the 27-year-old indie-folk artist, who records mononymously as Anjimile, spent the past decade whittling away at music as a hobby-turned-coping method. The experience of coming out to their parents as queer eventually inspired "Maker," a song that compares a redefinition of gender to one of faith--and paved the way for Giver Taker, their first album on Father/Daughter.

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The Lowdown: Anjimile Chithambo might be new to the spotlight, but he's been paying attention for a long time. His debut album, Giver Taker, carries a wide variety of influences -- among them church choirs, '80s pop, African music, and indie-folk -- and melds them together as if they were born for this, born to flow into one another. The Boston-based trans musician wrote much of Giver Taker while in treatment for drug and alcohol abuse, and many of the songs are also concerned with his experiences coming out as trans and non-binary.

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Giver Taker by Anjimile Anjimile is a Dallas-born, Boston-based child of African immigrants who has, over the last several years, been making a gender transition. Their last album, Colors, tracked the early stages of this evolution. Anjimile had just started taking testosterone and was still learning to sing with a new, lower voice. Material they had written just a few years before was high and out of range, and there's a thin-ness to the way they navigated the melodies.

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