Emmy The Great - First Love

(Muso's Guide, February 26, 2009)

Album review

The girl at school who you were obsessed with - you know the type - you wrote poems about her, sang songs about her, you imagined your fingers in her hair and daydreamed of the day she would notice you were alive?
That is not Emmy The Great.

Are you kidding?

That fantasy girl was the popular chick! She wouldn’t give you the time of day, remember?

This here Emma-Lee Moss, on the other hand, is the one you should have been obsessing over. She would have been quirky and different, liked indie bands while other girls liked lipgloss - and played guitar with passion in music class instead of skiving off to go shopping.

After a few years of gigging, Emmy The Great have built up quite a following - and quite a back catalogue of quality music.

First Love, Emmy’s debut longform record, rather tellingly had its release delayed because Emmy was displeased with the “slickness” of the mix that was presented to her.

That’s telling because the now-finalised album is anything but slick - rammed with the sort of delightful DIY production that makes indie fans break out in a cold sweat; there is little standardisation of levels, although the whole performance, although uneven in sound, never dips below perfect in terms of musical quality.

Starting out with the swaying ‘Absentee’, at first backed with only acoustic guitar, adding percussion after the first chorus, there quickly proves to be a real heart to the record which only serves to endear.

Pop culture offers many useful touchstones for Emmy, as in ‘24′ - “You are watching a programme for exactly one hour… Man on the screen he has done more in a minute than you have achieved in your whole entire life” - adding human feeling to the Duracell-bunny violence as perpetrated by Jack Bauer.

‘We Almost Had A Baby’, last year’s single, is a wry, tuneful exploration of a pregnancy scare, as layered with tambourine and as many ‘aah aah aahs’ as a 1950s girl group, waltzing along carelessly, but shot through with melancholy.

Jaunty highlight ‘Dylan’ canters along with a Celtic fiddle to see it through, while lowkey ‘On The Museum Island’ dials down the action - and up the sadness.

New single ‘First Love’ is a live favourite, incorporating the lead line from ‘Hallelujah’ - “The original Leonard Cohen version”. It is smart and touching, and touches as only Emmy knows how on the tender heart of lost love; “You were stroking me like a pet/But you didn’t own me yet,” she spins the tale, and you’re with her all the way.

The lovely ‘MIA’ is the high point of both heartfelt wonder and total quirk overload - it’s about a car crash, and the thoughts which flash through Emmy’s mind after impact, as she hums along with a still-playing car cassette - “I always liked this singer/I remember how you were the one who told me that her name/Was either Mia or M.I.A.”

Emmy The Great’s live shows are fun and interesting, but on record, the lyrics and musicality of the work really comes to light. The songs act as stories, and Emmy leads us through each one with such enthusiasm and delight that it seems as real - and yet as magical - a thing as you could imagine.

Emmy The Great was the girl at school who made you wonder.