Yesterday's News, Yellow Cab Strike Edition

[photo via]

Arcade Fire in an elevator!  Paella with Pela!  Die Hard on a bus!  Oh, these high-concept stunt-cute band videos.  Now we've a whole series wherein we're piling into the backs of cabs and puttering about aimlessly.  Something you really shouldn't be doing unless you're passed out drunk, bawling senselessly, or getting a blowjob.  And then I wouldn't think you'd want the lights up and a camera crew present.  Or, maybe these days, you would.

(via Skatterbrain)

A pretty good vehicle A fare venue  It works, though, for Emma Lee Moss (aka Emmy the Great (myspace)), a London-based folk singer.  In a bit of unplanned perfection, she starts strumming "Two Steps Forward" - a remembrance of a young romance with someone now-famous, a wondering how we move on and wind up wherever we might - while staring out the taxi's back window.

She's apparently amassing some "serious buzz" - isn't everyone, everywhere, these days? - and is keeping the right sorts of cohorts (The Guillemots' Fyfe Dangerfield has arranged her music, friend/collaborator Lightspeed Champion has been recording with Bright Eyes' Mike Mogis).  While you worry with someone like Emmy Tee Gee (who looks more like a Beverly Cleary heroine than an empress) that, should she get big enough ex-lovers are snorting stuff off her photo spreads, the backlash might snap her like a twig, there's this:  The writing is good.

I'm only going by demos (and vocally iffy ones, at that) I've skulked up online; Emmy has a single 7" available (the self-effacingly titled My Bad EP).  But what I've heard is clever without being overly indulgent(*), evocative and fantastic without getting precious.  She trots out enough details to convince, avoids overstuffing.  One venture into bombast ("Secret Circus") quickly retreats and apologizes ("You always told me that I tend to overdramatize...").  Sometimes, the ideas are just lovely. ("Never liked the country anyway/the birds they steal things from my sleep/they sing the promises I couldn't keep." ("Paper Trails"))

It's not her fault she's almost completely adorable.

"Do I Sing in American?"  Of course you do.  We invented fucking around in the back seat of a car.

The material does get dark.  It's fun, in that video, watching the fiddler do his best not to squirm as his seatmate pours on about her precious bodily fluids.  But he should be thankful she's not performing "MIA," a song about listening to a mixtape while trapped in a car accident waiting for the paramedics to come.  "Edward is Dedward," a song about a suicide, manages to hit every Kübler-Ross power point.  It's complicated, honest.  "Two hundred lowered eyes/A hundred mute goodbyes/I never you thought your threats would come good/You never did what you said you would."

• If you're in the UK, you can buy the My Bad EP here; a couple additional tracks are available for download at Rough Trade.
• The Daily Growl has a live mp3 of "Two Steps Forward," and some other mp3s from a recent radio session.
• More scattered about on Hype Machine.
• There are interviews at Drowned in Sound, Sweeping the Nation and on YouTube.
• She played New York last December

(*)  She's probably got two or three too many songs asserting the Godlessness of Everything.  Churches don't have the market cornered on Preachy.

*

People look at me funny - well, funnier - when I try to tell them how much I like Resolver, the first Nina-free Veruca Salt record.  And probably the worst way I could go about convincing anyone there's good stuff there would be a live performance featuring mannered vocals and an out-of-tune guitar:

Veruca Salt - Used to Know Her (Live at Summerfest 7-07-00)(mp3) (via)

 "Now she just doesn't matter..."  Oh yeah?  Louise makes like the Esther Williams of denial; the strength of Resolver is that it fails to live up to its Beatle-pun title.  She's totally unable to get over anything.  It's a bit pathetic, but pathetic in a loud, angry, awesome way.

The tabloid-worthy Famous Fuck in this number is Foo Fighter Dave Grohl, or at least we'll assume it is.  I'm not sure anyone in the band ever made it anyone's business but their own... but scuttlebutt had Grohl cheating on girlfriend Louise Post, co-frontwoman of Chicago rock band Veruca Salt, with Nina Gordon, the other frontwoman of Chicago rock band Veruca Salt.  Might not be true, but it's self-contained and delicious and would totally explain why Louise got So Fucking Pissed Off.

And you see which betrayal gets top billing here.  Dave's tossed off in the middle, but it starts and ends with Nina.

Conventional wisdom says that when Nina left the band, she took the hooks, Louise got the rock.  And Gordon had the only subsequent hit, the title track from her dreadful Adult Contemporary solo CD Tonight and the Rest of My Life.  But Resolver was hardly hookless, and it certainly wasn't toothless.  "Used to Know Her" is a huge song, huge.  It struts and howls and outside at Summerfest it sounds like Post had enough space to spew, enough support to enjoy herself.

The big difference between this and the studio version of the song is the line "I used to terrify her."  As it's repeated on Resolver, Post sounds guilty, a little frightened of herself.  Here, she sounds fucking proud.  Look what I did.  Take that, you scared little bitch.  You just don't matter.

tags: emmy the great  veruca salt  dave grohl  

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