First Love Emmy The Great Reviewed By : Michael Simon

Emma Lee-Moss, aka Emmy The Great, has taken her time on ‘First Love’, but with an end product this beautiful, it has clearly been well spent. It is reasuring to see that she of the presumptuous stage name and many a high-falluting collaboration (Norman Cook and Lightspeed Champion to name but two), retains a particularly light and personal touch throughout her debut album.

Flitting between the pop-culture of everyday life and an overarching dialogue about music, ‘First Love’ samples everything from 'Gloria in Excelsis' ('The Easter Parade') to Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah' on its title track. So far, so ordinary, but here are classics reclassified; familiar chords reimagined with precocious aplomb. While 'The Easter Parade' echoes its predecessor’s Christian imagery with a moment of spiritual reflection, 'Hallelujah' is beautifully subverted to seduction in 'First Love'.

More mundane relationships also become the stuff of poetry; 'Dylan' depicts an argument over the eponymous musician and '24' is a Jack Bauer marathon about a hopeless boyfriend, played earnestly. There's a sly humour on display throughout, though, perhaps strongest in 'MIA', which sees Emmy wondering how to pronounce the artist M.I.A.’s name in the event of a car crash as, “The day we took the car out in the rain is the day you forgot how to brake”. This playfulness consistently undercuts her sometimes dark subject matter, ensuring the album is never less than upbeat. In perfect counterpoint, the quietly underspoken acoustic production always lets the lyrics stand out for themselves.

‘First Love’ is an impressively cohesive, developed work, bereft of filler and brimming with thoughtful, evocative music. Unlike so many of her singer-songwriter peers, Emmy really is rather great after all.

9/10

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