My review: Emily Jane White - Alluvion

 My Review 

Emily Jane White - Alluvion

No one loves secrets so much as those who have no intention of keeping them.
(Charles Caleb Colton)

Here I am, as a loyal subject of Charles Colton: telling you a secret, sweet, valid, eloquent and wonderful, that lives inside a beam of orange and cobalt blue light.

Cobalt blue is a colour discovered in 1802 and this music contained in 'Alluvion' often seems to come from far away: an exciting and sensual event that can shock for its beauty and depth.

The girl from Oakland knows how to feed the stars of our dreams, how to be a fist that has knowledge of soft ways to communicate the abundance of her arguments and needs, human and not only artistic.

The content of this work ranges like a space shuttle in perpetual motion, busy because it has so much to give and there are so many places to deposit these enchantments that we banally call songs: it is much more than a collection of songs, much more.

She is a soul that strips itself bare, that investigates, takes note, reports with sounds and words the immensity of her feeling and understanding.

There is an acuity, a refinement, an unusual way of doing things that embraces particles that she colours with harmonious life: it may be her voice (a pure diamond that explodes in the heart) or her music (a continuous gentleness, like a single endless breath) and it may be much more, but here we are inside the mystery which makes us beautiful in each of the forty-four minutes of the album.

And in her seventh seal there is also room for her personal losses, traumas and difficulties, but hers is not a gift which leads us to reject them.

On the contrary: she has transformed everything into harmony and elegance, respecting herself and the listener by giving us her process of transformation.

She started off with folk music, but over the years she has gradually managed to bring together the need to add other elements in her sensitivity and artistic planning. 

And so the electronic part, pop, Dreampop and Shoegaze enter the grooves of "Alluvion".

The delicacy of her electropop is a masterpiece: it allows non-stop imaginative flights and smiles that convince the mind to grow.

What remains intact, as the lowest common denominator of her past, is her ability to be inclined to an intimacy that enables us to notice her, but without hurting her.

Because in Emily, strength and fragility coexist perfectly, like an enchantment that stuns and generates beautiful reactions.

In the record there is also room for death, covid, police violence and murdered women. Since there is also her wisdom and willingness to talk about the dark side of humanity: and he does it perfectly.

Now I am going to describe each of the songs included in this excellent stream of dense songs.

At the moment this is my favourite album of 2022. No doubt about it.

Song by song

Show me the war

It is war, with its streams of blood invading the breaths of those who remain alive, that opens the album: an elegant funeral march, between electronic music and a lump in the throat and vocals that are a beautiful bullet...

Crepuscule 

About the loss of someone, the second song shows how pain can be sung using a short melody, with the guitar capturing the sense of grief in a few notes, and then off to a refrain that opens the arms of solidarity.

Heresy (feat. DARKSHER)

A piano, then chords that get heavier, preceding the view of what is wrong, with a successful attempt to keep the drama in the short chorus. The song is like a gospel without a future, with an alarm siren of our conscience keeping us alert, while outside the cruelty continues and the piano, sadly, fascinates us...

Poisoned

With a folk start in the style of Amy Macdonald, Emily takes note of the pain of her surroundings but, as her great peculiarity, she leaves traces of drama in the music with a slight relief. She doesn't want to fatally wound us, she keeps us alive with a song that apparently seems to live within a vivacity that, given the lyrics, seems a forced act, for a beautiful window.

Body Against The Gun

A neofolk with the mask of a shiny carnival leads us to listen to a song that seems to move very well up to sparks of Heather Nova and Tori Amos, in a view where death shows us cold bodies and the silence is lit by an untiring piano.

The Hands Above Me

If the Cure were still melancholic they would have these guitars, while the doubled vocals tell of a held breath, of betrayals. As if Coldwave could meet sweetness, echoes of Darkwave held down with a pillow, while Emily addresses her America with a voice that is at once trembling and strong, with guitars that take joy away and leave it in the sky.

Mute Swan

Identities that change, questions that suddenly arise and here we are in Mute Swan, a subtle mantra with powerful and deep keyboards, narcotizing the sense of loss, with echoes of electronic music seducing the breath. Emily raises her voice register to the sky, while everything scratches the thoughts which become black boxes that would like to melt. And a knife sticks around with the support of this music like an elegant hypnosis...

Hold Them Alive

A song with bandages, shreds of trust that no longer scream, a walk started by a piano that meets a guitar that, terse and essential, explodes the anger slowly: there is no need for distortions because everything is already deposited in the lyrics. And only Nature remains to console us, to give us morsels of beauty. And this voice which flies in the heart like a pin that stings in a different way. But the end offers flashes of baroque music in a modern dress: here we can see how sadness can become attractive and beautiful!

Hollow Hearth

Micheal Nyman and Lorena McKennitt seem to embrace each other convinced that Emily is the right voice to sing this song, which is a list of generosity with a decadent breath, where the future dies almost immediately, using the softness of a melody that is a witch hidden in the Oakland bay.

I Spent the Years Frozen

The fire descends from the sky as if it were a bundle of violins and harpsichords with a renewed sound to be faced with an icy view in which to experience the daze of the senses. And it is a drama that the music, wisely, seems to conceal with its melodic variations. But you cannot always avoid holding back what is dramatic and so Emily gives her voice the role of opening our eyes.

Battle Call

The last track sounds like a shower to hide the drama of this world, knowing that in modern life there is nothing that can really cleanse the tragedies of this cruel existence. Drums and rich guitars ally themselves to a piano that flexes inside high notes, in a farewell march to the planet that reveals all the despondency that runs through our ignorance. A sumptuous and vehement way to say goodbye.

A definitely gothic album, intense, full of a conscience that frightens those who believe that the world is still a beautiful place and life an easy affair. Emily is a fairy who brings uncomfortable truths and does so with the ability to give music that knows how to mix drama and flowers of poetry. Meanwhile, all around, we are left with 'Everything that I see, life's blood raining down on me, no blind divinity justifies this to me'.

A masterpiece, it really is, travelling alone: let's not abandon it...

Alex Dematteis 

Musicshockworld

Salford

27th March 2022

https://music.apple.com/gb/album/alluvion/1604228785

https://emilyjanewhite.bandcamp.com/album/alluvion

https://open.spotify.com/album/2QiW6mdBWnYY7ygqhAj6wh?si=xCcYflUsRSuyWgTBJiSm5g