Em Marshall – The Building Light
Cotton Mill Records – 19 October 2018
Em Marshall is a singer-songwriter living in Devon on the fringes of Dartmoor, and I may be fanciful in thinking that on first acquaintance her music appears to reflect her adopted surroundings – it’s slightly austere, perhaps even forbidding, yet radiates a simple beauty and intensity that contradicts that austerity. Em is evidently an accomplished singer, and yet her delivery can seem a touch restrained, for all that it doesn’t lack expression. And I can also sense a feeling of uneasy almost-reticence that characterises her work – in both her performance and her writing. Reading her biography on her website, I can appreciate that the above qualities may well be an inevitable product of her life thus far, which has been nothing if not eventful, and in quite a disturbing way.
Although Em grew up in an ex-mining town in the Midlands, she substituted secondary school for a nomadic life, busking and travelling with various other musicians, first in the UK and then abroad, until she suffered serious and lasting physical damage in a motorbike accident in India. Her convalescence eventually led her to Devon, where she managed to settle and rebuild body and soul. Latterly sufficiently so to perform solo, including providing support for acts such as Geoff Lakeman and Tim Jones & The Dark Lanterns, and Tim Jones has himself helped Em out by producing this her debut album which was also mastered by Ian Carter of Stick in the Wheel. It was recorded in a converted cowshed studio on a Welsh dairy farm, and the overall feel is intimately lo-fi and stripped-back – refreshingly so. If the listener is able to offer a high degree of concentration, then Em’s music begins to repay the effort, albeit still gradually at first; The Building Light is a slow-burner for sure.
Em’s takes on traditional song form for a quarter of the album’s tracks: True Lovers Farewell opens the set stylishly enough, and gives a fair measure of what to expect from Em. An arguably less distinctive account of May Morning Dew comes midway through the album’s second half, but Rosemary Lane is perhaps the most persuasive, and characteristic, example of Em’s edgy vocal and the way it overlays her restless, animated guitar playing. You’ll hear various other instrumental sounds on the album too at times, but they’re only gently present, at times subliminal; nigh imperceptible (to allow maximum emphasis on Em’s voice and lyrics). Those responsible are Em’s musician friends Robin Timmis (viola, violin), Alasdair Paton (accordion), Gavin Blench (bodhrán, mouth harp) and Jack Beddis (drums).
Nine of the album’s dozen tracks are Em’s own snapshots of incidents or feelings or experiences that have shaped her life along the way and/or led to her current state. Em’s concise yet tellingly informative liner notes reveal much about the songs that is amplified when listening to the album. We learn, for instance, that the disc’s title song is “about a mending heart, nearly ready for more”, while Love He Said teaches us that “with unhappy endings come new beginnings, surprising gains in all that’s lost” and the lovely closer In Your Arms conveys “the twisty turny bits of falling in love” (what an evocative phrase!). On Blood Red, Em portrays a walk down to her favourite beach and the memories it evokes, whereas Chesterfields brings memories of Derbyshire from another phase of Em’s past; Come Find Me concerns her time spent as a teenager without a home, and India Song tells of the above-mentioned motorbike crash.
Take a quiet moment to listen to The Building Light to fully appreciate what Em has to offer. It is an attractively packaged and honest debut album, one which tends to beg the question of how, and in what direction, Em’s writing will develop in the years ahead.