Hannah Georgas – All That Emotion
Arts & Crafts/Brassland – Out Now
Sometimes it must seem like Hannah Georgas is playing second fiddle in her own story, with All That Emotion being produced by The National’s Aaron Dessner, who recently produced an album for a more high profile client who really doesn’t need all the attention she’s getting anyway. While there are similarities between her work and the work of Taylor Swift, Georgas and Dessner have been working on this album for the better part of two years. While Swift’s work will get all the attention, Georgas provides more excitement.
Presenting a deeper and more nuanced work while using the same basic lineup, Georgas offers a more vivid picture of life, even if it isn’t always pretty. While the keyboard lays out gentle chords, guitars and tuned wood blocks add contrasting patterns to lyrics that reveal That Emotion isn’t always easy, “Oh, the road you know/ Seems like you’re going it alone/ And you keep tripping over stones.” At the end of the day, Georgas finds she’s still hiding behind her emotions.
Keyboards and marimbas seem to fuel Easy, a song that despite the title suggests that relationships never are. “Memories of you slowly fade/ Losing sight of you more every day/ Don’t wanna feel it when I see your face/ Don’t wanna feel it when I hear your name.” Bass guitar and bass drum team up to provide a huge pulse to the song, yet the accompaniment still seems sparse. Such is the glory of Dessner’s production work with engineer Jon Low.
Despite the serious nature of relationships, Dreams speaks to a whole other world where things seem to go right. Against an insistent percussive pulse Georgas finds the time to joke, “and if the world comes down/ I wanna hold your hand.” There’s no, “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” as if that were really necessary. On the other hand, Punching Bag is about a less than perfect relationship. As Hannah notes, “The talking vocal became the voice in my head that is actually speaking the truth about being in a dysfunctional relationship. The main vocal was the part of me that wanted to ignore the elephant in the room and just stay in the relationship.” It’s a way of exposing the duality often seen but never explicitly discussed.
Putting so much of herself on display, Same Mistakes, features Hannah speaking to a younger version of herself. The lessons she has learned have a universal quality to them, “I wish I could go back and tell my younger self/ None of this matters/ Even though it hurts like hell.” It’s pretty hard not to have been in that place, feeling alone in a world that simply doesn’t understand. Finally, there’s Cruel, a plea for understanding set to a lone keyboard asking, “Why you gotta go and be so cruel/ ‘Cause everyone around you/ Everyone around you’s hurting too.”
Exposing more than just an incredible vocal range, Hannah Georgas reveals some of the complexities of All That Emotion. While the ride may not always be an easy one, it is well worth taking.
Order All That Emotion via Bandcamp – https://hannahgeorgas.bandcamp.com/album/all-that-emotion