First Love

Four seconds into the album, one can immediately hear the driving force of Emmy the Great: Emma-Lee Moss. Gentle and merciful yet always with a hint of pain and bitterness, Emmy’s vocals tell tales of death, suffering, love, sex, family and friends, but always with a humanistic personal touch.

‘Absentee’ tells of a death in the family and how it brings the extended relatives together, forcing children to pick themselves up and grow. Accompanied at first by a single guitar, the song begins timid and mournful, as if one had lost someone close. It soon progresses though with rolling drums, male harmony, a slightly distorted bass and organ, building confidence and fortitude before becoming slightly angry with Emmy’s realisation of the secrets kept from her before ending humbly with the realisation of a “liaison” the discovering of secrets creates between her and the absentee.

Equally as sombre is ’24’, the explanation to a possible partner that he is wasting his life and that Emmy would marry him for “money or luck”, but she doesn’t think he will ever achieve either. Accompanied only by the picking of a guitar and in turn gentle strings, light piano and mellow flute, the track is agonisingly bleak. Explaining that a good act is always countered by a bad one – “One man is the parachute / And the other is the knife that cuts the brake” – the disheartening mood is lifted with the saying that “One man is the accident / The other is the hand that stops the blood” and that Emmy will look for this hand/

Perhaps the most powerful song on the album is current single, ‘We Almost Had A Baby’, in which an ex-partner is blamed for a believed pregnancy. Though at first one feels great sympathy and almost pity towards the voice of the song, later lyrics show that they are confident, “in control” and in charge of the situation and will have the decision as to whether the partner should “have to come and choose a name”. The musical accompaniment is also beautifully bitter-sweet with a waltz rhythm, choral oohs and aahs in the background and dreamy glockenspiel. In addition, as if the lyrics weren’t obvious enough, Emmy delivers a startling denouement to the song with the announcement that “We almost had a baby”.

In the days of apparently over 100 versions of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’, it’s a breath of fresh air to see a more inventive take on the masterpiece with Emmy consolidating original material and borrowed elements of the aforementioned masterpiece in order to tell the memory of listening to the song with her ‘First Love’. With the wistful lyrics telling of the lamentable day and how the thought of the companion is now ‘burnt’ in her, Emmy’s song is a memory of love, that although she finds afflictive, she does not regret – “I wish that I’d never come / But now that I have, I would do it again”. The heavily ironic chorus, breathy synth haunting the bridges and the emergence of the marching drum building to the anticlimax of the end all forge a more tainted and “spat out[…]broken” ‘Hallelujah’.

First Love is a great independent production from a clearly talented artist. Influenced by such artists as Cohen, Dylan, Belle and Sebastian and in collaboration with others such as Lightspeed Champion, Emmy lead her band in making powerful, emotional celebratory and tragic music that will haunt you for weeks.