Emmy the Great. First Love

Before actually listening to Emmy the Great, there are two things that could possibly irritate you before you have even switched the stereo on. Firstly there is the name which could give some lazy reviewers the ammunition for a shooting fish-in-a-barrel type review of ‘Emmy the not-so-great (guffaw). Secondly the arbitrary pigeon-holing into that increasingly meaningless catch-all anti-folk, has already cursed the names of Devandra Bahnhart and Jeffrey Lewis since they too play acoustic guitars and sings songs that can be described as ‘quirky’ or ‘kooky’ or other feeble adjectives people try to describe singers who choose to play bare footed.

Once you get past these minor obstacles however, you eventually get the main obstacles of the actually songs that come out of the stereo. First Love rolls by inoffensively with its mellow hippy guitars and slight almost twee vocals without ever really giving it anything to make it stand out from the current crop of exciting female vocalists such as MIA or Regina Spektor.

This despite the songs of fake pregnancies (We nearly had a baby) and the two lovers listening to Leonard Cohen’s track Hallelujah (First Love) try to have a seemingly dark under tone to them but instead end up appearing as edgy as Kate Nash. Lyrically there are some good moments but few and far between and only goes to show how good this album could have been if it took another direction “well you didn't stop, when I told you stop” from the aforementioned We Nearly had a Baby is generally a disturbing lyric, but you get the idea that many a 6th form students have written stuff like this in their bedrooms when trying to get over some guy in their media studies class.

Overall not an awful album, just one with so many petite songs that could it pass you by blandly so easily whilst listening to it. But then again there is a huge market for folkie/indie pop that is ever expanding nowadays and you do feel that Emmy is going to be one of the heavyweights of the genre.