Emily Jane White‘s new album, Alluvion, might win the award for the Most Accurate Cover Image of the Year. Ms. White stands on a stark beach surrounded by towering rocks and watched over by a blue sky that you can only see at certain moments during dusk. She appears to be holding, or perhaps projecting, a single light in the gothic landscape. Her black dress melds into the water and mud below her feet and reflects her image below her, as if she arose from this salty, sandy, chilled landscape like a ghost searching for a lover whose ship crashed on the pictured shore.
And the whole album sounds like this image – haunting synths, cold-wave beats, and White’s alluring, hypnotic vocals.
On “Show Me the War,” White sings about “life’s blood raining down on me” while she craves for explanations and reasons behind the chaos she sees in the world every day. “Crepuscule” is a song about loss and embracing the grief when it hits so hard (“This mourning lives in everyone who has lost someone. Aurora in lightning, the living and the dying.”). The sparse guitar notes in it are perfect. “Heresy” is full of stark piano and White’s vocals sliding around you like a cold wind that signals an approaching storm.
“Poisoned” takes on a goth-western feel with echoed guitars and countrified beats while White sings about a friend carrying grief that she recognizes as they walked through “harm drenched fields.” “Body Against the Gun” is about a friend having to flee to another state for a medical procedure and White remembering her upbringing “in light so dim with those who sang assailing hymns.”
White calls out to a higher power on “The Hands Above Me,” a lovely gothic track of longing for peace and understanding (“Gonna write a note to the hands above me. Gonna ask them on which side do they air.”). “Mute Swan” is a song about carrying the wounds of a relationship gone, probably caused by a death (judging from White’s lyrics about how even uttering her lover’s name causes her pain).
“Hold Them Alive,” while sounding bleak, is actually uplifting if you examine the lyrics. White sings about carrying loss, and the physical and mental wounds of it, with grace through life and remembering the love that was there: “The flora and fauna, incantations surround you. It lives in a stark liminal space within you.” The love is there, disguised as grief. “Hollow Earth” has the peppiest beats on the album, but it doesn’t lose any of the heavy themes of loss and longing.
“I Spent the Years Frozen” is a powerful track about desire and how it can so intensely burn that it might consume you. The quick fade-out is like someone blowing out a candle flame. “Battle Call” ends the album with lyrics of hope, of being able to rise up from the mud and heal from scars on our bodies and our souls.
Ms. White isn’t screwing around. She’s here to entrance us and be a guiding light out of a murky darkness (See the album cover?). She’s been there. She’s found the tricky, sometimes treacherous path out of the swamp, and Alluvion is a map to dry land and brighter skies.
Keep your mind open.
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[Thanks to Monica at Speakeasy PR.]
