Emma Russack: Sounds Of Our City

- Emma Russack is a young singer-songwriter who has been getting about, a little glumly, if her music is anything to go by, from the South Coast of NSW in her little old hometown of Narooma, up to Wollongong and across to the orphanage for sad little indie singer-songwriters from around Australia: Melbourne, with a sly trip over to South America in between. All along the way she's been quietly putting out stuff for Spunk records. Now, with the arrival of her first full length, it's at one and the same time a big change for her and... exactly what I was expecting. What it is, take the very first number off Sounds of Our City, Tonight, and compare it with one of the key tracks, Sex On The Beach, from her 2010 EP Peasants. The former is a sparse, laconic and defiant folk-country song and it has a most curious concoction of brooding and boasting all about just how easy it is for our heroine, with her dark and sonorous voice, to pick some bloke up at the pub and have her way with him. It's the fact that we still live in such a prudish damn society, where a young woman singing a song about 'that sort of thing' can give everyone a little bit of a guilty thrill - that's what gives it such a great, roiling, mixture of emotions. There's drunken sadness, anger, a listlessness that comes from when you profane life's taboos - because you destroy some of it's meaning too - but out the other side of that, it's a taking of that power for yourself, it liberates too. I find that quite powerful, and... well it seems a little bit of a let down - she did exactly the same sort of thing on Sex On The Beach, but in a jazz style - which was quite a significant component of that record ... and it just didn't work half as well. She also played it for laughs and that part didn't really work either. I guess she must agree because The Sounds Of Our City, well they don't include jazz that's for sure. That name is a bit weird, actually: where is this city of hers? Is it Melbourne, where she's just moved, that's a bit presumptuous isn't it? The second song is set in Colombia, anyway, and like nearly all the others it's more about the space between a woman and a man more than anything or anywhere else. She owns up to it on Easy To Forget, late in the record, where she sings about hearing 'the sounds of the city' and it being, almost like a lifeline, pulling her out of the tiny space she's been caught up in and reminding her why she's here. That shrinking psychological space where, with her brand of endlessly hushed and quiet country and folk she mourns love's little sadnesses, she works it with a subtlety that is impressive. If you listen to the current single Friends Not Lovers she works in the uplifting power of what could've been a Springsteen anthem if you'd put a power chord or two into this little elegy for the bittersweet fading of love. Nice vocals from Kid Sam's Kieran Ryan too. Yeah there's a lot going on in the Sounds Of Our City, it's one really worth paying attention to.

- Chris Cobcroft.