An early Monday morning with Emma Anderson's Pearlies. An interesting experience. The record came out a few weeks ago. It's been lauded in the circles where you would expect it to be lauded. Indie ones. And it's deserving of that praise. It's a finely worked on, nuanced and considered statement.
Anderson is a musician with a slightly pained history and a story to tell. Lush, (where she came from), were a band with a respectable career and one that made some fine records. But they, and the scene they emerged from, the Shoegaze one, were on the receiving end of their fair share of critical bickbats and Anderson and Miki Berenyi her partner in Lush, were embattled constantly by the brutal sexism that the music business is charactersed by. The curtain also came down on Lush when their dummer hung himself.What can you say about the scare that this leaves.
Pearlies is a finely wrought and well produced record. As you'd expect from a musician with Anderson's back catalogue and pedigree, it's highly atmospheric. It sounds like the Lush album that never was. As you'd also expect, Anderson misses Berenyi's voice, which was always slightly stronger and has more character than hers.
Still, I enjoyed ,forty minutes with Pearlies. Anderson has always been a talented songwriter and perhaps this will help that be more generally and widely recognised. There's much textured bloodletting here that David Lynch, the master of this kind of emotional theatre, would appreciate and applaud. Recommended.
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