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Review
On the one hand sweeping and allusive, on the other breathtakingly intimate and personal, Virtue is a dense, accomplished set of songs brought on by the disintegration of Emma-Lee Moss's engagement. Amid the swirling Paper Forest she sings the words "I'm blessed" with heartbreaking clarity; a kind of awestruck self-belief. Her delivery anchors the whole affair, assuming an emotional weight only glimpsed at previously.
Released through the band's own Close Harbour imprint and financed via the PledgeMusic fan-funding scheme, it is a far bigger, roomier set than debut album First Love, wherein many of the same players revolve around the core duo of Moss and Euan Hinshelwood. Along with producer Gareth Jones, the latter is responsible for the musical shift in tone. Softly wailing electric guitars and fuzzy basslines underpin many of the songs, which – married to Moss's plangent tones and a bevy of backing vocalists – creates a dreamy, otherworldly effect. If First Love sounded merely (very, very) pretty, then Virtue sees the pair hit upon something a little more idiosyncratic and unique.
Which is, you feel, exactly what they were aiming for. From the sultry, suggestive cover art to the wealth of characters and themes touched on over its 10 songs, Virtue is an extraordinarily confident work, even if that confidence is shaped by confusion and turmoil. Moss plays with the idea of narrative in the slow-burning Creation and delves into Jungian theory in Cassandra, talks dinosaur sex in, erm, Dinosaur Sex and paradise in North, pondering virtue and femininity all the while (A Woman, a Woman, a Century of Sleep is particularly stirring). There's a lot to chew on and conclusions are sometimes elusive, though the explorations precipitating them are unanimously enchanting.
On Paper Forest she sings of celebrating "The things that break us open and the things that make us feel." It's these things the record is ultimately concerned with, and she's never painted them as effectively as on the piano-led closer Trellick Tower. Moss's fiancé left her after discovering the church, and the song finds her alone in the flat they used to share, equating love with religion in an effort to work it all out. Resigned but never accusatory, it makes for a poignant reassurance that sometimes feeling utterly bewildered and lost is not only natural, but a strange and unmistakeable cause for optimism.
--James Skinner
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
There's a set of themes running through Virtue that link the songs together to make something more than the sum of the parts. The album is largely about weddings and the religious and cultural baggage that attends them. Writer and singer Emma-Lee Moss was engaged to be married in summer 2010. However, her fiancé suddenly broke off the engagement when he decided to become a religious missionary: this album has consequently become a means of exorcising the awfulness of that event, and in the process it is one of the most personal, cogent and thrilling albums I've listened to in a long time.
The component pieces come from cultural history, and from Moss's own perceptive insight both into the physical world, such as shipping container cranes like dinosaurs that fornicate in a futile effort to avoid extinction, and the stark 1960's brutalism of West London's Trellick Tower, which is a metaphor for Moss's vanished relationship. There are fragments of fairytales (and what are fairytales other than stylised ordeals - princesses that sleep for a hundred years, the path through the dark forest) and lots of religious metaphors: North is about the selfish exclusivity of the paradises that some religious people want to inhabit; Trellick Tower uses religious relics as a metaphor for Moss's abandoned state - the relics "ache for when the saint had breath". There are even some secondary sources - there's a quote from Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot, which is itself a quote from the Gospel according to Luke.
Gareth Jones's production has given this album a consistent rich sound (with cellos, harps and a small choir); that and the consistency of vision between the songs (I make it sound like a concept album: it's not that, but it is something more than an arbitraty collection of songs) make this album an order of magnitude better than the debut album First Love, which was itself pretty good. Euan Hinshalwood (of Younghusband) plays more of a part in this album than in the first one; he is close to becoming a partner in the band.
Moss is an articulate voice, her honesty tempered with subversive humour. Paper Forest has more words per minute than anyone could comfortably sing, but it has at it core a simple desolation: "standing in the afterglow of rapture but there is no rapture left". Given the background to the album, it's unsurprisingly a theme that is repeated: "what use is life to those who aren't living"? That this album was made independently, without financial backing from a record company, and was sold after it had been mastered, means that she has been able to make this album with only benign interference. If it has helped Moss to put that distressing episode in her life behind her, it has also given us an album that resonates intellectually and emotionally, and that gets noticeably better each time you listen to it. It would be unwise to say so soon after it's release that this is a great album. I think it might be.
The component pieces come from cultural history, and from Moss's own perceptive insight both into the physical world, such as shipping container cranes like dinosaurs that fornicate in a futile effort to avoid extinction, and the stark 1960's brutalism of West London's Trellick Tower, which is a metaphor for Moss's vanished relationship. There are fragments of fairytales (and what are fairytales other than stylised ordeals - princesses that sleep for a hundred years, the path through the dark forest) and lots of religious metaphors: North is about the selfish exclusivity of the paradises that some religious people want to inhabit; Trellick Tower uses religious relics as a metaphor for Moss's abandoned state - the relics "ache for when the saint had breath". There are even some secondary sources - there's a quote from Patti Smith's Dancing Barefoot, which is itself a quote from the Gospel according to Luke.
Gareth Jones's production has given this album a consistent rich sound (with cellos, harps and a small choir); that and the consistency of vision between the songs (I make it sound like a concept album: it's not that, but it is something more than an arbitraty collection of songs) make this album an order of magnitude better than the debut album First Love, which was itself pretty good. Euan Hinshalwood (of Younghusband) plays more of a part in this album than in the first one; he is close to becoming a partner in the band.
Moss is an articulate voice, her honesty tempered with subversive humour. Paper Forest has more words per minute than anyone could comfortably sing, but it has at it core a simple desolation: "standing in the afterglow of rapture but there is no rapture left". Given the background to the album, it's unsurprisingly a theme that is repeated: "what use is life to those who aren't living"? That this album was made independently, without financial backing from a record company, and was sold after it had been mastered, means that she has been able to make this album with only benign interference. If it has helped Moss to put that distressing episode in her life behind her, it has also given us an album that resonates intellectually and emotionally, and that gets noticeably better each time you listen to it. It would be unwise to say so soon after it's release that this is a great album. I think it might be.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Audio CD
This album is an impressive return from the already impressive First Love - Bonus Edition. Emmy has a wonderful singing voice, clear and melodic, punchy and almost staccato but ultimately incredibly versatile, imbuing her lyrics with the frankness and openness in which I believe her songs are intended. The music is enticing to the ear and accompanies her lyrics perfectly, each song evoking a world of it's own with vibrant and interesting but unobtrusive instrumentation and choral arrangements as the words and music play off each other in turn, joining harmoniously throughout in a more stylistically coherent structure than her debut.
Like many great artists, Emmy is not one to shy away from the tragedies, experiences and nuances of life, instead utilising them to great effect, making her music incredibly mature and poignant rather than deliberately nonsensical and commercially nondescript. Thus, we are welcomed refreshingly and offered a delightful insight into Emmy and her many influences and experiences in an intimate and inviting manner befitting a friend rather than a fan.
The album itself is seemingly wrought with the dichotomy of life, the contradictions in our nature and experience that often make our lives what they are. The apparent futility of life itself when confronted with individual action against the collective of humanity, the pain of loss and its necessity in appreciating joy. This is often conveyed via detachment through fairytale and religious imagery, in a way that both evokes a collective nostalgia of childhood and home but also shows how we can all find it easier to express ourselves, sometimes unintentionally, through indirect rather than direct means. Essentially, Virtue appears to be an outlet for the personal troubles she has gone through in recent times; though ultimately not a journey of sadness but one of living and coming to terms with life.
Despite her established critical acclaim, I just hope that unlike Cassandra, Emmy's voice reaches a wider audience than she is currently receiving and of which she's most certainly deserving. Whilst she continues to produce music like this, I am however, confident that her supporters will appreciate the depth and complexity of her talent and appreciate the openness to which we have been the privileged subjects.
Like many great artists, Emmy is not one to shy away from the tragedies, experiences and nuances of life, instead utilising them to great effect, making her music incredibly mature and poignant rather than deliberately nonsensical and commercially nondescript. Thus, we are welcomed refreshingly and offered a delightful insight into Emmy and her many influences and experiences in an intimate and inviting manner befitting a friend rather than a fan.
The album itself is seemingly wrought with the dichotomy of life, the contradictions in our nature and experience that often make our lives what they are. The apparent futility of life itself when confronted with individual action against the collective of humanity, the pain of loss and its necessity in appreciating joy. This is often conveyed via detachment through fairytale and religious imagery, in a way that both evokes a collective nostalgia of childhood and home but also shows how we can all find it easier to express ourselves, sometimes unintentionally, through indirect rather than direct means. Essentially, Virtue appears to be an outlet for the personal troubles she has gone through in recent times; though ultimately not a journey of sadness but one of living and coming to terms with life.
Despite her established critical acclaim, I just hope that unlike Cassandra, Emmy's voice reaches a wider audience than she is currently receiving and of which she's most certainly deserving. Whilst she continues to produce music like this, I am however, confident that her supporters will appreciate the depth and complexity of her talent and appreciate the openness to which we have been the privileged subjects.
Format:Audio CD
Althought First Love remains my favourite album by Emmy the Great, Virtue is a great follow-up and benefits from far-improved producing and mixing. Brilliant to listen to on a big sound system with some epic moments.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Rewarding listening
Saw the band play live in Lancaster last night, very impressive, and am enjoying listening to this new album. Read more
Published 8 months ago by J. K. Cook
Refreshing!
I heard about this singer on Radio 4, she sang a few tunes live and i liked her sound. It is easy listening unfortunately wasn't my kind of music whan I heard the whole album, so I... Read more
Published 10 months ago by Baba Bunting
Emmy grows, but may have outgrown me
i'm torn with this album. certainly it is a grower and establishes Emmy as a mature songwriter and performer. Read more
Published 10 months ago by jam
Breaking Up Is Good To Do
Emmy Moss has come up with the goods in her latest album. She is more confident in her singing and her backups are beautifully orchestrated although in a couple of numbers she is... Read more
Published 10 months ago by sfauntie
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