Emily Jane White says ‘there is a bit of somber variety’ on her latest album and she ‘hopes it will speak to you.’ It will.
25 March 2022 | James Porteous | Clipper Media News
Emily Jane White is a musician, songwriter, and poet from Oakland, CA.
She began performing under her own name in 2003 and released her first album “Dark Undercoat” in 2007, with “Victorian America“, “Ode to Sentience“, and “Blood/Lines“, “They Moved in Shadow All Together” (2016) following.
From Facebook:
My new album “Alluvion” is out today! I am deeply humbled and grateful for the exceptional team I worked with in making this record. It comes straight from my melancholic heart to yours.
I labored many pandemic laden hours in my apartment chiseling and refining every detail of this body of work and I hope it speaks to you. There’s a bit of somber variety on here for everyone.
Immense gratitude to my co-producer (arranger, multi-instrumentalist) Anton Patzner for collaborating with me remotely day in and day out for the better half of 2021.
He’s an immense talent and teacher and has elevated my songs to new levels, not to mention inspired me to keep growing in new ways as an artist and musician. This is our second record as collaborators and I’m beyond proud of the growth we’ve achieved between this record and the last.
Thank you to Alex DeGroot for the exceptional mix, which through his beautiful artistry deeply enhanced what Anton and I executed.
Thanks to Jonathan Berlin on the master, John Courage on the Baritone, Bass, Electric Guitar, and Bass VI, Nick Ott on the drums recorded by Jay Pellici New, Improved Recording , Kristin Cofer on Photography/Design, and label Talitres . I’m currently touring in Europe and I hope to see many new and familiar faces out there on the road. Thank you for listening and for your continued support
Artist Biography
by Jason Birchmeier (AllMusic)
Emily Jane White is a singer/songwriter from California who released her debut album in 2007. Influenced by American blues and folk music tradition along with contemporary female singer/songwriters such as PJ Harvey and Kate Bush, she has been compared to Chan Marshall of Cat Power and Hope Sandoval of Mazzy Star.
While studying at the University of California Santa Cruz during the early 2000s, White fronted a band called the Diamond Star Halos and began developing her craft as a singer/songwriter.
After college she moved to France for a while and established herself as a solo artist. Upon returning to California in 2006 and basing herself in San Francisco, she collaborated with producer Wainwright Hewlett on her full-length album debut, Dark Undercoat (2007).
Released initially on the Oakland, California-based label Double Negative Records, Dark Undercoat was subsequently licensed for international release by the label Talitres in 2008 and reached number 143 on the French albums chart.
Her sophomore effort, Victorian American, was released on Talitres in France in 2009, and on Milan in the United States in early 2010. That year, she also lent vocals to indie pop band Lonely Drifter Karen‘s album Fall of Spring.
White‘s own Ode to Sentience arrived on Talitres in 2011 and a year later in the U.S. on Antenna Farm Records. Both follow-ups also hit the French albums chart.
In late 2013, the songwriter’s fourth long-player, the lusher but still brooding Blood/Lines, was released by Talitres and Important Records. A reference to the opening of Cormac McCarthy‘s novel Outer Dark, They Moved in Shadow All Together was recorded in Oakland and San Francisco over a period of two years.
It returned White to the French charts in the spring of 2016, with its U.K. and North American release following soon after. For 2019’s Immanent Fire, White worked with arranger Anton Patzner, who helped her achieve an epic, immersive sound as she explored a feminine solution to the imminent extinction of the human species.
Allmsuic
Emily Jane White announces new album ‘Alluvion’
Dark singer/songwriter Emily Jane White has announced a followup to 2019’s Immanent Fire, Alluvion, our March 25 via Talitres.
The album was produced and arranged by Anton Patzner (who’s worked with Bright Eyes, Taking Back Sunday, Pinback, Darkest Hour, and more) and mixed by frequent Zola Jesus collaborator Alex DeGroot. One song features UK artist Darkher.
The first single is “Show Me the War,” which “calls attention to the convergence of misogyny and racialized violence as a pervasive worldwide epidemic,” Emily says.
“During the summer of 2020 in Oakland, California, I wrote this song in response to the many political uprisings sparked by the murder of George Floyd. ‘Show Me the War’ also highlights more global examples of injustice like femicide in Juarez, Mexico and the near-total abortion ban in Poland.
By grieving the many losses resulting from social and ecological injustice, we shed light on these unacceptable epidemics and those deeply affected by them, further enabling change.”
Tracklist
Show Me The War
Crepuscule
Heresy (feat. Darkher)
Poisoned
Body Against the Gun
The Hands Above Me
Mute Swan
Hold Them Alive
Hollow Hearth
I Spent the Years Frozen
Battle Call
Eivør / Emily Jane White — 2022 Tour Dates
July 26 Montreal, QC Le National
July 28 Somerville, MA The Sinclair
July 29 New York, NY Le Poisson Rouge
July 30 Silver Spring, MD The Fillmore
August 1 Chicago, IL Thalia Hall
August 2 Minneapolis, MN Cedar Cultural Center
August 5 Boulder, CO The Fox Theatre
August 7 Portland, OR The Old Church
August 8 Vancouver, BC The Rickshaw
August 9 Seattle, WA The Crocodile
August 11 San Francisco, CA The Chapel
August 13 Los Angeles, CA The El Rey Theatre
Bio for latest album, Alluvion
Written by Brooke Lober + Nick Ott | Alluvion | Website
Rooted in a moment of catastrophe, Alluvion is an album about personal and collective grief resulting from the loss of human life and the continued loss of our natural world.
We live in a moment of merging traumas, of converging environmental, social, and political crises.
These crises are exacerbated by our lack of cultural practices for individual and also shared, public grieving–which is not without consequence.
We often find ourselves mired in “disenfranchised grief,” a grieving that cannot be recognized, shared, or named.
Emily’s album offers a space to consider where grieving is absent in our world, and where it is deeply necessary. Grief moves in waves and cycles, and through its flood we can build anew. Alluvion: the gradual addition to the land by the wash of water against a shore.
How can we mourn what we cannot know we’ve lost? While living through the “sixth extinction,” we may not always perceive the mass death that surrounds us, even as we sometimes remain unconscious of pervasive violence against women, or racist police violence.
And yet, a sense of loss abounds, as Emily writes, “This mourning lives in everyone who has lost someone / Aurora in lightning, the living and the dying.”
Thus, in a moment defined by overlapping crises, our inability to grieve becomes a roadblock, separating us from the journey in which the COVID-19 pandemic would, indeed, be “a portal,” as Arundhati Roy wrote in March 2020.
We cannot reach the hope that might be engendered through the changed consciousness that can result from effective grieving.
This is where Emily’s new album sets its mark: the work itself is an act of public grieving, grieving as breathing: breathing the space in which we might be able to gather up ourselves and move toward the wake of this disaster, the spark of what is yet to come.
Co-produced and arranged by multi-instrumentalist Anton Patzner (Foxtails Brigade, Judgement Day), Alluvion was written and recorded during the height of the pandemic.
Although Nick Ott’s drums and John Courage’s guitars were recorded in studios with all parties present, most of the instruments were recorded while Emily and Anton were in different locations.
Despite the need for social distancing, they were able to develop a consistent workflow using remote methods, binding the recording together with the intimacy of Emily’s voice, the meticulous layering of Anton’s arrangements, and the outstanding mix by Alex DeGroot.
More so than on any previous release, Emily almost completely eschews folk arrangements and instrumentation.
Alluvion edges the borders of shoegaze and electronic pop without losing sight of the light within the gloom, the hope inside the void. The lead single, “Show Me the War,” seamlessly blends synthesizer pulses and guitars, deep acoustic toms with drum machines.
The somber dirge “Heresy” soars above obscurant dust clouds created by the destruction of women’s spaces and cultures, guest vocalist Darkher’s operatic lamentations a light that leads the listener out of grief’s darkness.
Even “Poisoned,” the most traditionally Americana-sounding of the tracks, mixes Emily’s finger-picked melody with distorted guitar stabs and a wall of synths, her lyrics a guide through these contradictions.
In “Hold Them Alive,” Emily confronts the destruction caused by unacknowledged grief directly: “So how do I walk while holding some kind of words that morph from bereaving? Withered is the arch, the moon hangs bleeding.
I’ve lived, the dark energy feeding.” – Written by Brooke Lober + Nick Ott
