When Bob Dylan plugged in his electric guitar at the Newport Folk Festival some 50 years ago, he upset a lot of hidebound folkies in the process.
The times, we know, have moved on and so, at the very least, Emma-Lee Moss – better known as Emmy The Great – won’t have to brook any boos from fans livid that she’s hung up the folk twangs and ‘gone electronic’ for her latest album, ‘Second Love‘.
If ever an album’s been a long time coming, it’s this one. (Unless you’re still crossed-fingered for a Stone Roses Thrice Coming.) A peripatetic Moss spent two years writing the songs while flitting between the UK and USA.
Tantilisingly for her, if not a whole lot frustrating too, it’s been shop-ready for the past 12 months but for the record label, Bella Union, tarrying so they could push some of Moss’ labelmates first.
A doubtless judicious label maneuver in the long run because Beach House‘s two albums released last year were among them, precluding any fisticuffs of interest that might have oozed from the Baltimore duo’s jutting influence on parts of ‘Second Love’, especially on gorgeous tracks like ‘Constantly‘, which seems to be wandering through mist leftover from ‘Myth‘.
The sleek production as a whole gleams anew for an Emmy The Great we’re used to hearing softly filtering out through an acoustic guitar. Instead there are ‘Sexual Healing‘-type beats on the vulnerable ‘Less Than Three‘ (“You make me weak like a heartbeat”) and a quivering rhythm on ‘Swimming Pool‘ (featuring Wild Beasts‘ Tom Fleming) that sounds likes it’s being played underwater.
‘Algorithm‘ is so nice in its approach that if it turned out to be a cover of a forgotten 1970s easy-listening song it wouldn’t hike an eyebrow (to clarify, it isn’t), while ‘Shadowlawns‘ gallops on horseback like the score from a Clint Eastwood Western. On ‘Hyperlink‘ Moss sings: “Love is the answer, but I’m a comfortable liar”; her artful ambiguities fool nobody.
The audio production she’s adhered to might have developed since last time around but, like her previous work, the feeling that love is the Great Provider still breathes the same heaviness on the lips of her songs. She anguishes over a lover’s acceptance on ‘Social Halo‘, even from his friends: “All of your friends, they called me Yoko”. The love isn’t always amative though, and the wittiest moment is saved for ‘Phoenixes‘, a beatless ode to teenage friendship: “We thought that weight-loss was survival, we thought that Vogue was French for bible”.
Moss sometimes turns her hand to journalism when she’s not making music; in an article last month for The Guardian she summed up her, often painful, joy of recently reading David Foster Wallace’s modern masterpiece Infinite Jest. It’s a tree trunk of a book about the search for a film so deliriously entertaining that it incapacitates the watcher for evermore.
Listening to ‘Second Love’ won’t cause any such similar paralysis out of frenzied excitement, and the flow occasionally drags (see ‘easy-listening’ note), but it’s a piece of thoughtful pop, wonderfully sung, that a slight drift into contemporary seas has done nothing to harm Moss’s legacy, however great or otherwise it ends up being.
