Emmy The Great – First Love [2009]

• Author: jotien
• January 23, 2009
• Category: Author: Jotien

try

buy

It’s been a while since Next Big Thing Tips by the NME and DiS but Emmy the Great‘s debut is a triumph, with a maturity beyond her years, and with a humour no less enjoyable for being subtler.

It’s a weird but significant historic coincidence that the day First Love arrives at the DiS office, two versions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’ are going head to head for the 2008 Christmas # 1. The title track, at the centre (and heart) of Emmy’s album, also happens to interpolate some of Cohen’s lyrics and a modified melody. On the same day, The Times 2 runs a feature debating the definitive version but Emmy offers a re-write that’s unique for actually stating what the song means to her; why you choose to play it – or sing it – when you do; and why, of all the lines you might choose to borrow, her pick is “it’s a sad and it’s a broken hallelujah” before her more buoyantly folksy chorus “hallelujah! The skies were so much bluer!” (sung with double measure of irony, of course).

With or without the historic coincidence, it’s still a good place to start this review, because the album’s (excellent) opening four songs owe as much to Leonard Cohen as they do to Stuart Murdoch, both of whose influences are buried in the DNA of songs that are much more Emmy’s own, these days. As ever, there are cute vignettes (“we discovered the magazines under your bed”), and nods to other songs (the affirmation of togetherness – “we arrrrrre!” – at the end of ‘Bad things coming’, lifted from a gorgeous Go-Betweens duet), but these familiar Emmy-isms are subordinated to the creation of an essentially realistic world; one that may not always be enriched by – but is certainly complicated by – very serious questions about Life, Love, Death, the Afterlife and religion.

source read more….

• 4 Responses
• Read comments...
• Comment Feeds