- This one is a curve ball, no doubt, but one you won’t want to let slip through to the catcher. Emerson Snowe is the solo moniker of Jarrod M. Mahon, who happens to be the bassist in everybody’s favourite little indie-band-that-could, The Creases. I can’t be one-hundred-percent, but I’m pretty sure that anyone who likes the infectious pop of The Creases is going to snap together with the Emerson sound easily enough, even though it’s a quite substantially different one.
Mahon has been refining his personal style since before his band existed. He started ghosting out a lo-fi folk, heavy on the reverb, back in 2012, when he was just eighteen. There are echoes (lots of echoes, but seriously...) of a sketchpad Jeff Buckley or Thom Yorke. Perhaps Daniel Johnston is the most accurate reference point though; certainly you’ll hear a number of his songs covered if you visit Jarrod’s bandcamp. That carefully measured, off-kilter troubadour sound is riven throughout the really very large number of releases that you’ll find there and, indeed on the other bandcamp and the two soundclouds that haphazardly contain the deluge of his bedroom musings.
Over the course of the years, Jarrod has only occasionally decided to embellish the bare bones of his sound. Every now and then you’ll hear a drum machine here, some backing vox there. When I said ‘refined’ before, what I really meant was, for six years Jarod just grabbed his guitar and went with whatever, until now, suddenly, he’s clearly decided to take out the rag and polish his lo-fi craft to the brightest possible finish. The main evidence for this is, oddly, an EP’s worth of covers. They’ve appeared in dribs and drabs online and I can’t tell you much about an official release, except, now they’re up on Jarrod’s own soundcloud in one slab with an end of February release date. I don’t know who -if anyone- is releasing it, but someone should.
It’s still lo-fi, it’s still deliberately oh-so-slightly off key, but the refinement in every level of the orchestration and musicianship is striking. The songs are a handful of bittersweet gems and, obviously, quite a bit of the success here belongs to them; but a good deal of credit must go to Mahon for curating a collection of not entirely obvious, extremely stylish choices. Big Star, (Sandy) Alex G, Galaxie 500, The Beach Boys, Nancy Sinatra and The Replacements: the old and the new come together in diverse but complementary styles, each filtered through Mahon’s personal prism and thus given the perfect excuse for being here.
I’ll be honest with you: whatever else I may have said about The Creases over the years, to listen to the band I never thought of them as having any great insight into the history of music. The nuanced understanding of the last sixty years in pop music is just one of the reasons I’m quite blown away by Emerson Snowe Plays Covers. Please head on over to soundcloud and have a listen for the others.
- Chris Cobcroft.