Maggie Morrison

Maggie Morrison's pitch-perfect, brazenly unaffected singing instrument is perhaps (Lookbook's) most well-selected keepsake from the glory days of the discotheque. Live or on record, Morrison never slumps, never slides, never half-asses a single note. Like an Annie Lennox sans buzz cut, Morrison has a voice that manages to be forcefully intimate, as if emanating from some phantom space between your ears, and unseeably remote. Something in Morrison's live delivery may account for this—she has as little use for meaningless mannerisms as she does for tremolo. As chillingly immaculate as a sine wave, Morrison and her voice have an inhuman perfection to them. Fortunately for her, and for us, Voight-Kampf tests are still a distant fiction. If she's a replicant, we won't raise a peep. [City Pages, Best Vocalist (Female) 2010]