"I am pretty angry," says Laurie Anderson. She had just returned home to New York after a trip to Australia where she and husband Lou Reed curated a multiweek arts

festival. On Homeland, her first studio album in 10 years, her vibram five fingers anger is perceptible and pervasive. It

emerged from a stage piece Anderson began crafting in the latter half of the George W. Bush years. "I was walking around thinking that my identity didn't depend on

what I think of the United States. But then, in some way it kind of does. The torture at Abu Ghraib really hit me. My sense of being an American depended on thinking

we didn't do stuff like that. So I wrote a lot of things about that. And then as we sort of segued into the Obama [presidency], I thought: I'm going to see what would

happen if we just started again in this way. But it's even darker today, with the [financial collapse] and pelicans dragging themselves out of the gulf. It's beyond

heartbreaking for everyone. If I started writing this now, it would be even angrier."

Laurie Anderson hasn't built her career from the clay of outrage. She hasn't even built it up by seeming to be of a single mind. On some of her works, she switches

back and forth between her natural voice to an electronically manipulated male alter ego (that's her in character above) and she can collaborate easily with Peter

Gabriel or William Burroughs. Anderson has long made her own fun by drifting with ease between disparate personae. After starting out as a sometimes-visual, sometimes

-performance artist, Anderson stumbled accidentally into a major-label recording career once the famous BBC DJ John Peel promoted her first single, "O Superman"—an

eight-minute vamp patterned after a Massenet aria—back in 1981. As befits someone with a career so indebted to randomness, Anderson has tended to sound bemused by all

aspects of the world—even its drawbacks.

That's different now. On Homeland, she's quite specific about what's wrong with the world, even if she's not prescriptive about what should change. The closest thing

to a single on the record is the seven-minute "Only an Expert," which five fingers shoes dumps a truckload of disdain on our

(presumptive) best and brightest who gave us the financial collapse, state-sponsored torture, and the media's faux-outrage scandals. Over a danceable beat created in

part by Kieren Hebden (otherwise known as Four Tet, a DJ beloved by the indie-rock set), "Only an Expert" lands its hardest blow with this dark-humored verse: