CD: Emma Tricca – Relic

Ostensibly folk, Emma Tricca’s second album Relic sounds more like a devotional song cycle heard in a church than on a club or festival stage. The massed chorale of Tricca’s voice which opens “Sunday Reverie”, the spectral organ of “Golden Chimes” and the lyrics of “Take me Away”, which yearn of being transported to somewhere she has never been where the trees are aging, all invoke the search for the spiritual.

Initially pegged as a Greenwich Village-fascinated folkie inspired by encounters with John Renbourn and Bob Dylan's early champion Odetta, Tricca's voice is as singular and as impossible to place as Jackson C. Frank, Bridget St. John and Sibylle Baier. If it weren’t for her acoustic guitar and that unforbidding voice, her closest kin would be the Nico of “Frozen Warnings”. There is nothing off-the-shelf about Relic.

The sparse brass arrangement and distant electronic noise heard on the closing version of “Golden Chimes” don't make this allusive album any less hazy.  Relic is not a reflection on the urban, the state of the nation or where music is today, but a reaction to what surrounds and nags at us. If there's an antidote to the clamour and constant tide of crass, pointless debate about Britain in 2014, this is it.

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