I'm tired of Emmy the Great being lumped in with crappy singer-songwriters who've had way too much hype but couldn't write a decent lyric if they were tied to a chair and had a pistol pointed at their temple. Emma-Lee Moss bloomed from a singer-songwritery London milieu but she's a cut above the pack.
I speak as one who's sick to death of acoustic guitar-strumming whiners. Like Malcolm Middleton, another fine underrated British singer-songwriter, she doesn't throw out one-size-fits-all palliatives for mopers; her songs are grounded yet enigmatic, allegorical, and as precisely constructed as her syllables are delivered.
And they bear examination - her second album is less straightforward and sometimes features more abstruse themes than her debut, but it's all still rendered sweet by mellow chamber pop backing. Subject matter includes the eventual doom of planet Earth ("Dinosaur Sex"), the psychology of the Cassandra complex ("Cassandra"), imagistic tales of uncanny utopia ("North"), and, most potent of all, her agony at her boyfriend leaving her to become a born-again Christian ("Trellick Tower"), a true heart-breaker rendered over a lovely quiet piano backing.
"Exit Night" is worth quoting at length, simply to give a flavour of Emmy the Great's style: "Somewhere there's a country you remember from your youth/ On the surface of this country is the one they built on top of it/ The highway leads to everything except for what they buried underneath/ There is a country made of telegrams and tail-coats and nobody to grieve it". Like much of the album, the lines emanate poetry and a melancholy Brideshead-era Evelyn Waugh might have appreciated, all brushed over with light, airy lateral wit. Like her first album, Emmy the Great's latest is a treasure and an easy, pithy listen, but this time round she's starting to develop a lyrical mysticism that's direct, human and fascinating.
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