Emma Scarr – Scarred For Life
Independent – Out Now
As well as being one half of Black*Scarr with Johnny Black, Emma Scarr has a parallel solo career, albeit she’s been a little lax on that count with this being her first album as such in nine years. And, recorded in lockdown, save for Garry Smith remotely contributing slide, 12 string, Tricone resonator and mandola on three tracks, it’s a totally one-woman affair, Scarr playing all the instruments, which include table banging percussion but no drums or electric bass, with the music’s influences encompassing country, Americana, traditional and folk-punk, delivered in an unvarnished, raspy but compelling vocal at times evocative of Kirsty MacColl.
The material encompasses previously unrecorded songs from the past 15 years, alongside two from 2020, one of the former providing the opener with Kathy O’Toole, a reminiscence of a friend from her teenage years, a painter and decorator from Ireland, that won the first Watford Folk Song Competition in 2015. A celebration of the musical debt owed to the Irish musicians with whom she played in London during the 90s, it slowly jogs along as, accompanied by strummed mandolin, fiddle and whistle, she unfolds the memories.
The harmonica haunted, cascading melody of When I Used To Drink continues the reflective note with its reminiscences of a once over-affectionate relationship with the bottle and the security and companionship it provided, followed on with the lurching mazurka-feel to Sirens In July as it talks of the regular drought-caused yearly fires on Wanstead Flats, harmonica adding a touch of the spaghetti westerns.
A reference to the secluded waters of Snaresbrook at the tip of Epping Forest, taken at a gentle, rueful pace The Ballad of Hollow Ponds is more especially a song about getting older and how life portrayed on the film posters and in songs is rarely akin to the real thing, exchanging the fiery passion of youth for rowing and watching the ripples.
Still within Epping Forest, riding a mandola wave and electric guitar break, My Debden Prince is a simple rootsy love song, to be followed in a slow sway-along with the harmonica-blowing, simple drum thump, mandolin shimmering Last Year’s Joke, a near six-minute wry (not necessarily autobiographical) self-portrait musing on a past dysfunctional relationship into which she plunged headlong (“moderation’s not something I can do”) only to be left beached (“I know nothing of men or middle-aged sex”) and wallowing in the rage and self-pity of a 14-year-old.
It’s back to an uptempo, lurching driving strum, Irish folk flurries and alcohol as a crutch for lack of self-worth with the shoulder of support on offer in Molly What’s Your Poison? before the lyrical GPS again locates to Essex with River Blackwater, a sub-tributary of the Thames that rises near Saffron Walden, a flow along, squeezebox coloured romantic getaway from the urban daily grind, laughing like a loon even as she ponders storm clouds gathering in her mind
It ends, first, with the fiddle and mandolin-led folk-punk bounce and harmonica solo of Stay, a song about a can’t live with you, can’t live without you relationship that might well be the characters from Fairytale of New York somewhere further down the line, and, finally, striking a similar thematic note (and with vague musical echoes of the aforementioned), the sway-along, shanty-ish Blackberry Picking, a fruit-based fable about a relationship in which the narrator’s companion is never satisfied and always wants more and better. Both she and Black have gathered a solid following for their albums and live shows in and around their stomping ground, this terrific album once again reinforcing that their music, together or solo, is deserving of a far wider and far bigger audience.
Order via Bandcamp: https://emmascarr.bandcamp.com/