By Alex Rake (The Cascade) – Email
Emma-Lee Moss, known by her stage name Emmy the Great, so far hasn’t done the same thing twice. Her first album, First Love (2009), was an anti-folk kick to the heart exploring the way every bit of arbitrary minutia becomes significant to young minds. Then Virtue (2011), apparently written after her fiancee converted to Christianity and left her, dealt with the inevitability of endings — “Dinosaur sex led to nothing / We will lead as far as we can lead,” she sings — with a more atmospheric approach to the music.
Her most recent album, Second Love, is straight-up dance-pop. But while it uses what is typically considered a less intellectual style of music, it also has a more mature perspective on relationships. Second Love therefore has a surreal, simultaneous sense of progression and regression. Either way, it shows that Emmy the Great is in constant development as an artist.
The title, Second Love demands that the listener contrast the new album with First Love. The first album was produced out of the context of the unofficial anti-folk “movement” of the 2000s, which consisted of artists like the Moldy Peaches, Andrew Jackson Jihad, and Regina Spektor: too sensitive to be punk rockers but too irreverent to write the same old kind of contemporary folk songs that had come out since the 1960s. Taking tropes like lo-fi home-recording and honesty in lyrics to humorous extremes (for example, the Moldy Peaches sing golden lines like “All I wanna do is watch cartoons with you” and “I feel like I’m chasing the guy from Lucky Charms”), anti-folk is a label for singer / songwriters who are able to balance not taking themselves at all seriously while retaining the brutal introspection one expects from folk music.
First Love was an achievement within this context. Emmy was able to say all the things one isn’t traditionally supposed to in lyrics: the cute and the specific. In “MIA,” Emmy sings about a car crash that killed the speaker’s friend, the driver, but the most important part of the crash in the moment is what’s playing on the radio: “I always liked this singer / I remember how you were the one that told me / That her name was either Mia or M.I.A.” The cuteness and seeming ignorance of this line, combined with gentle honking of the music, makes the terribleness of the moment all the more intense. The specificity of the events in the song also make the event feel more universal; this is a real story Emmy’s telling us, and so it’s easier to let our guards down and relate to it.
On Second Love, Emmy is far less cute and specific. The dance-pop style of the music doesn’t allow for the same wordiness, and so the lyrics are more condensed and slower. On “Constantly,” she sings, “Go easy on yourself / A heartless river flows / The pages will unfold for you and me.” There is nothing precise about these lyrics, and their attempt at universality actually make them easier to criticize. Why are you just jamming words together, Emmy? But at the same time, the universality shows a development in the songwriter’s engagement with life; she can see herself from a broader perspective and no longer needs to pull particular images out of her real life to express her ideas. She is also far less quick to condemn past lovers or point out their absurdity.
This maturity makes for a less rebellious and therefore less “fun” listen than her previous work (it also makes the album less of a wild emotional rollercoaster), but it adds a new dimension to Emmy the Great as an artist. Knowing that she can write songs like this, too, means that the earlier stuff does not and will not define her. The future looks good! Emmy has calmed down, for now, but I predict that she is far from settling.
