Emmy the Great First Love. I've just finished writing about Animal Collective and its macho male energy and now to this feminine artifact of restraint and daintiness. Is that misogynistic enough? She has a bit of Natalie Merchant in her voice! A reach but still I am in love. Perhaps not all like Natalie really but it's archetypal folk. Melodica and now more urgency, marching band drums and lyrics crafted delicately to tell a meaningful tale of youth and exuberance erm...or something. Ah youth, Obama's dreadfully uninspiring speech was written by a 27 year old. He wrote it in a Starbucks. Word is that he reached back deep, all the way to 1997 for great historical allusions and passion for the golden days of yore when this country was beloved and brilliant. Surely youth is the defining characteristic for his position as official mouthpiece for the commander in chief. Raised on a steady diet of Dharma and Greg, I am anxious to hear more of his wit and bravura. Second song. A Bukowski reference. Emmy the Young, she's eminently qualified to be HUD secretary by that measure alone. It's folk music. A bit like a Kristen Hersh solo record. A bit Rodney Allen, a bit Delores O'Riordan. Really. Does anyone over 25 like Charles Bukowski? He seems dangerous when we were young and yet sad and pitiable when wake older. Wealthy drug addicts, well he married rich, always bore me. I suppose he was a poor alcoholic but they bore me as well. Next song. It's a bit pop, very pop, Carol King pop, brilliant, I am greatly enjoying this record, I like the emphasis on the initial syllable of each line it's at turns awkward and charming. Strings. Backing vocals, it's got an arrangement for grown-ups. Martin Carr killed Charles Bukowski. The thing about youth is that it mistakes passion for depth. Passion makes the young create brilliant pop songs and poetry and paintings but age and wisdom make one slow down before rushing headlong into asinine schemes such as Cap and Trade and extending the legal protections of the US Constitution to enemy combatants. John Paul Stevens is an adolescent. I know. There is an immaturity in monomania, it was why when I was young I listened to the Smiths mainly to the exclusion of everything else. Now that i am old and wise and reflective I recognize by errors but when in the throes of monomania passion overwhelms reason and so there it is. This is a bit Dolly Parton. Nice. Fourth song, The Easter Parade, a bit chugging, the music is so quiet, the keys on a piano are delicately impressed and the guitar played outside in the hall so as not to wake the babies writing the new rules for Collateralized Debt Obligations. I think I am meant to be listening intently to the lyrics, But you needn't, no really. This is the first I've heard from Emmy the Great and I was always under the sway of the mistaken belief that she was a personality driven artist but that is not the whole story not certainly by the given strength of this album. It's delicate and dreamy and romantic and beautiful. All things beautiful will help to carry us through the maddening years to come. We move from terrible President to terrible President, an everlasting cycle. Liberal made inroads in germany, Amity Schlaes heart must be glowing. I am also in love with Amity Schlaes you know and I am much more handsome than her husband but he's likely more familiar with the appealing traits of coherence and logic. So much about this record is subdued, subtle, hushed. It's a dagger in the heart of bombast and hysteria. It nestles in my being alongside the Cocoanut Groove record, it is as sublime and heraldic as that record is, honestly. Classical references abound, if only she would throw in a bit of Latin, oh wait...ah. I like the album cover, there should be more album cover collages, Lara Lockton should be a wealthy woman by now turning down one meaningful commission after another. Next song, starts off with a meander, turns to a menace, a slice western, insistent. She has some wonderful arrangements, I've already said that, but this is pop folk and an extremely accomplished sort. Her force of charisma surely powers the transition from delicate murmuring to dominant storytelling. My pet theory about isolation or the fear of it is buttressed by this article today. Like the song says 'Probst and Winfrey are on your side while Thoreau and Proust are on mine' or so it should be. But I would like to have friends. If I knew how. Next song, guitars and voice, she isn't a great singer but she works well within its limitations, the echoey reverb is on high. It adds a cosmic gentility that might be lacking untreated. So she then is one of a very small number of exceptions, an oddball in communion with her soul, isolated enough, turned away enough, separate from the clutter and noise of modern connectivity. But then connectivity is re-established to confirm the fruits of her period of solitude. As it should be. Ever have a brilliant idea arrive to a group engaging in brainstorm sessions? No, never, rhetorical. Consensus produces the average of all opinions, at best, it is less worse than the worst but it is always less best than the greatest. A bit like Capitalism. The gradient of risk and courage versus the tendency to be part of the herd is a difficult force to massage. I despise brainstorming sessions. Inertia is a powerful drag on the weak. Emmy is great because she's powerful, able to throw 18 kegs of ale over an 18 foot wall if she needed to. Next, War, racing piano and guitar, she joins us restless and breathless and afraid of standing still for fear of sniper attack from partisans hidden in the reeds along the shore. Racing strings join in now. It's frantic, a soft frenzy of emotion and now it flowers into a full composition of expanded temperatures and intensities. This sounds like a record from a very young person. It's bloody excellent. First Love, now. Lyrics here are a bit silly. But we overlook because it is first love feelings and of course it's meant to be sappy and ridiculous, it always is, no one has Petrarchian conventions when you are staring across a sixth grade classroom awkwardly. Leonard Cohen reference. I don't much like Leonard Cohen really, I know he's a legend and all but he never meant a thing to me. Even as I am a lapsed Canadian. I took very much pride in my Canada recently. I learned that one of my least favorite prime ministers ever, Mckenzie King, had a longstanding flirtation with spiritualism and the occult. Surely Mckenzie was aware long ago of the coming calamity of 2012. If only I believed in the onset of disaster so near it might spur me on to proclaim my heart's desires to that someone I mean to break my spell of loneliness. But even when I am with someone who wants to be kind and near I feel frightened of my own inadequacy. There isn't any appeal in that. Confidence. That's key. Where do I buy confidence? Emmy is confident seeming, she's demure and frail but there is a spark of defiance and intensity and a wit to cover any insecurity she might possess. I have wit. I have charm. I just don't have a belief in any of those things being able to overcome whatever it is that I feel camouflages my goodness to anyone else. It's all oddly narcissistic. This is another of the marvelous things on this record, there are furious chords, rustic squeals and an amateurish feel that makes it all seem earnest and pure. I don't think it really sounds like Natalie Merchant at all. It was meant as a compliment. I love Natalie Merchant, mostly just the Natalie Merchant from 1985, but I would forgive her for Please Forgive us if only for a smile in recompense. But then everyone is in love with 1985 Natalie Merchant. Next song. MIA, a quiet one, but then they all sorta begin with a tender restraint and then build elegantly into something more fierce and fiery. Some quixotic flute? Recorder? Melodica or accordion. Who knows. I've been watching Waterloo Bridge over and over and now that I am over the perplexity of anyone finding Robert Taylor attractive I can't get over the intense sadness of it. It's a beautiful melancholy that is portrayed. The ending is absolutely tragic but you can't help hoping that somehow Vivien Leigh will win out at the end. She thought he was dead. It was wartime. She fell in love with him before she knew about the heather and peat that is in Ireland anyhow and still the unfortunate outcome, so so sad. I recommend it. Vivien Leigh is highly underappreciated, the curse of being beautiful. Apparently she was mad, rather so, probably much more than any of these pixies with guitars and hair slides. Strings, lovely little violins and an acoustic guitar, a reprise, a bit of Palace Brothers atmosphere. Christmastime in appalachicolirmingham. Woo doggy. It's wonderful and lovely. So Lovely. She's been somewhat hyped in some circles. Deservedly so. Reprise complete. A folk chugger has begun. Emmy Lou? is it Emmylou? Not so flinty, warmer, more awesomer. I have a standing prejudice against any music made before I was born except for that from the Cowsills, the Left Banke and Caterina Valente. Those are the exceptions. I am running out of space on my DVR. I have dozens of movies recorded from TCM and I have watched all of them and I don't want to erase them. I really don't think that I can live without Sylvia Scarlett or Down to Earth(all through my head all day long "Terpsichore! Terpsichore!) or The Mortal Storm. Margaret Sullavan's death scene in the latter fully lives up to Gore VIdal's praiseworthy description of her unique talent for dying. The skiing scenes make me giggle. Frank Morgan as an eminent German Academic is even more comical but Margaret Sullavan the non-Aryan straddled between her racist Aryan half brothers and the kind and decent conscientious objector Jimmy Stewart is tender and affecting. Why are movies so awful today then? I don't know. Everything Reminds Me of You, long song, drum machine, slide guitar, slow organ, your traditional county song. Epic. it could be a love song from Bob Stanley to Hugo Chavez or Evo Morales' jumper. There was an interesting article on what makes people hate people who are not like them in the Christmas issue of the Economist and it comes down to identifiers and sex. Here then we break people into separate groups based on arbitrary characteristics such as race or religion or sexual orientation to sow our future destruction. But then I've never understood this need to feel a part of a larger whole. Perhaps this is because I am a member of a privileged sect-Canadians! Does Emmy the Great want to be part of the greater anti-folk scene? is she hoping to be unmistakably aligned with Kimya Dawson or Ani Difranco? Or would she desire to be evaluated on her own two feet? This was a bit of the foundation of Joebama's victory, there was, undoubtedly, a rising tide in his favour and people wanted to ride that to some utopia though deep in their hearts they knew the dream was filled only with disappointment. He's a socialist democrat, not a classical liberal, he is going to be hostile to business, he is going to raise taxes, he is going to favour unions to the exclusion of the average working stiff, he's going to instill resentment among different groups and merely accentuate those dreaded identifiers. It's just how things have always been. Nothing will ever change. Not until the Aztecs rise from Texcoco and with bronze blades rip the hearts from everyone on the board of the St Louis Federal Reserve. Last song, a plaintive number of urban wonder and regret. It's quaint and romantic and splendid and alive.