Emma Tricca
Aspirin Sun
Bella Union
7 April 2023
A sense of new beginnings, of change and acceptance, filters through Aspirin Sun, Emma Tricca’s fourth album and first for beloved indie frontrunners Bella Union. Acceptance implies some previous trauma though, and Aspirin Sun has more than its fair share of grief. Tricca’s father died shortly after the release of her previous record, St Peter, and that loss is brought into immediate, dazzling focus on Devotion, Aspirin Sun’s short but fraught opening track. Tricca’s voice is clear, exposed above a set of descending piano chords, and we get to hear every nuance of grief, resignation and hope as the forlorn keys are slowly overcome by bright glimmers and sparkling studio effects.
Ostensibly, Tricca takes her cue from the more interesting solo performers of the late sixties and early seventies. Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen or Sibylle Baier could be reference points, but so too could some of the more experimental artists of the era: Brigitte Fontaine or Nico, perhaps. That doesn’t tell the whole story, though. A decidedly more contemporary take on experimental pop filters through, thanks in part to Tricca’s long-term collaborators: Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth fame plays drums while bassist Pete Galub and Dream Syndicate guitarist Jason Victor complete a varied and highly proficient lineup.
Musically, Tricca taps into the Italian classicism she grew up with alongside the airy chamber folk and psychedelic pop that she has perfected. Songs like Christodora House, sundrenched but sad, stand like bleached architectural relics in a desert, while the slow-burning Leaves unfolds with a ragged widescreen splendour, and King Blixa is a melodic slice of West Coast folk-pop, like a bummed-out Bacharach, or Karen Carpenter jamming with David Crosby.
There is a filmic quality to Tricca’s songwriting, and she acknowledges a debt to Fellini and Wenders on Autumn’s Fiery Tongue, an urgent sandblasted odyssey through a dream landscape. Through The Poet’s Eyes is a jangling, hallucinatory pagan trance redolent of Buffy Sainte-Marie’s weirder moments. The album’s eleven-minute centrepiece Ruben’s House pushes forward on an insistent, circular guitar motif before becoming more exploratory and expansive, taking on a mirage-like shimmer. It builds into a kind of hazy, cathartic neo-krautrock blowout that should come as no surprise, given that Tricca has named Neu! and Can as influences.
Perhaps most surprising is cloning track Space And Time, which begins as a simple strum, goes through some mind-bending harmonic shifts and brain-melting electric guitars and comes out the other side as a mariachi psych-folk masterpiece, perfectly capturing the mood of new horizons and bright vistas glimpsed through the darker reality of the present.
It might be an album that captures change in its moment of occurring, but one thing hasn’t changed: Tricca is still one of our most valuable and interesting songwriters, capable of strange and beautiful sonic flights of fancy and unexpected lyrical turns. Aspirin Sun is her best yet.
Emma Tricca has a London headline show at The Grace in Highbury & Islington on Wednesday, 19th April (The show will be with the full US band). Tickets are available here.