- I’ve always found the quiet bleakness of Emma Russack’s approach to indie music refreshing -and what does that say about me?- she is unique though. Hers are not the lacerating whispers of Elliott Smith, the drunken tragedy of Sarah Mary Chadwick or the deep, mournful and broken crooning of Leonard Cohen. Emma Russack has carved her own little niche in the world of regret.
I’ve heard it said before that her music drifts, almost genreless and I think there’s something in that. It is actually a similarity with Sarah Mary Chadwick, in that for both her and Russack the music is not the point in itself, but rather it’s the way they make themselves heard, to say what they’ve got to.
I think because of this I get a variety of unusual impressions listening to her fifth full-length, Winter Blues. There are more than a few moments that seem less like the acoustic folk-rock they present as and more like a bizarre quasi-kraut-rock because Russack is repetitively vamping through the same loop, while she tries to capture an elusive thought and tie it to the music. Album closer Never Before is a prime example: two chords flit back and forth like a moth’s wings obsessively whirring, as it batters itself against the lightbulb. Russack’s monotone voice sifts through the detritus of the past and we get lines like “I’ve not been sleeping, like I’m used to / So my mind it, has conversations / It says Emma, what destroyed you / Were your answers to simple questions.”
In the face of that it seems improbable, but sometimes the songcraft draws on pretty classic pop, but the trick is it’s slowed down as though completely mired in its own emotion. Take the album’s second cut, What Is Love. You may think I’m crazy, but I reckon this could be a Bacharach tune, especially with the playful call-and-response that closes it out. Well, it could have been playful: in Russack’s hands, it slows to a mournful dirge and all the teasing answers to the question become a little irrelevant. What is love? It doesn’t matter, we’ll never know.
The combination of these two approaches made me think -and again, I’m aware of how ridiculous it sounds- of some Chitown producer chopping and screwing Russack’s snatches of song, so that she has a stable of handy loops to ramble over, as long as she likes. Mostly that’s not as long as I might be making you think. Winter Blues eddies through little fragments, chasing recollections of relationships and tentatively shaking them to see if any insights tumble out. It’s as wistful as Nico, if Nico, played jangly, DIY guitar, wore tracky-dacks and drank wine from a box while she moped.
After a few cursory listens, I come out of this album with a jumble of Russack’s feelings. The dragging depression takes half-hearted swipes at updraughts of cautious happiness and nostalgia. Love and loss, success and failure chase each other round and it’s difficult to tell what’s the present and what’s the past, what’s been and what’s to come. The ominous and the optimistic seem to end up in a tired holding pattern.
The gently exhausted honesty of Emma Russack might destroy us if she really wound up and hit the listening public with the full force of the emotion hidden in there. In five records she hasn’t done that yet and I suppose that speaks to a certain maturity, knowing that’s generally not how life works. This isn’t teen angst, but another, subtler kind, slowly rolling out across the years to come; just a little winter blues.
- Chris Cobcroft.