Album: Emmy the Great - First Love

With the British music scene seemingly full of female solo-artists, the somewhat unfair query currently on the lips of the masses when presented with London-based singer-songwriter Emma Lee-Moss concerns whether she has something special to set her apart from the rest. With this, her long-awaited debut album, the critics finally have something substantial to chew on. So in a land of Amy, Lily and Duffy, what is it that Emmy The Great has to offer?

Well for starters, she sounds nothing like them. The fresh but familiar sound that Emmy presents on First Love comprises a quite unique but indefinably influenced blend of indie, folk and pop that lies a world away from many of her ‘rivals’.

The folk imprint is most clearly left in the album’s waltzing opener, ‘Absentee’, where the vocal harmonies, the deployment of an accordion and the memories of ‘last Christmas’ reminded this listener of everything good about The Pogues. But the first real impact of the album comes in ‘24’ where Emmy’s hauntingly quiet tone of accusation overlays a gracefully flowing accompaniment. The wonderfully subtle blend between acoustic and electric guitars here provides a hugely effective backdrop to the lyrics that are, without a doubt, a big part of what makes Emmy great. Take, for example, ‘We Almost Had A Baby’, a lilting assertion of independence that includes the Frankenstein-esque ‘I was only a baby/Now I am what you made me’.

Indeed it’s the true-to-life qualities of the lyrics that might result in similarities being drawn to other female solo acts today, but it’s a comparison from which Emmy emerges victorious; you’d be hard-pressed to find anything that plunges to depths such as these in, say, a Kate Nash song. Emmy’s prose has a striking organic quality, almost seeming to mirror a stream of consciousness. In the beautiful melodic lines of ‘MIA’, a passenger’s chilling slow-motion experience of a car crash, she perfectly captures the peculiar trails of thought embarked upon in such shocking circumstances.

The recording and production are excellent; songs that have been in Emmy’s repertoire for a number of years are given that extra layer of gloss enabling them to form part of a cohesive album without removing any of their original clarity. In the complacent atheism of ‘Easter Parade’, a definite highlight, the distant bass-drum beats and shimmering violins lend the song a sense of the epic that it never possessed in its previous incarnations, and the brilliantly recorded string accompaniment in ‘War’ serves only to enhance its introverted panic.

While many write songs in homage to their heroes, Emmy The Great instead draws on facets of their work to enrich her own narratives, like in ‘Dylan’ where the folk legend’s output becomes the dagger in a stab at pretentiousness, or in the title-track where fragments of Cohen’s ‘Halleluiah’ are reconstructed to create a trudging tale of unrequited affection.

This album is by no means perfect and there are occasions when it seems to lose momentum but these are just blemishes in a bigger, better picture. This is a highly promising start from a dedicated musician who, above all, allows herself to be influenced without losing any of her originality. And isn’t that an integral part of what makes a great artist? Here’s hoping First Love isn’t Emmy’s last.

First Love is out now.

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