Compact DISCovery

Jaimie Vernon

EMMA-LEE: Backseat Heroine
eONE Music

Backseat Heroine is the sophomore release by Toronto’s Emma-Lee and by all accounts is a major departure from her 2008 debut Never Just A Dream that was a decidedly jazz-pop record that hinted at alt-country and blues. 
 
Backseat Heroine is a different beast altogether. The jazz elements have been abandoned (with the exception of the crooner “Bring Back Your Love”) and the alt-country gets a little more face time. “Not Coming By” recalls The Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins in its quiet passages but those don’t last long as the song turns into a rollicking competitor for Blue Rodeo’s less somnambulistic ‘rockers’.

“Figure It Out” would fit perfectly into a Taylor Swift playlist and effectively stomp all over it. The song has a hook a mile wide and bursts into a Motown rave-up during the middle-eight. 
 
“Pool of Tears” and “I Could Live with Dying Tonight” takes her into a k.d.lang and Patsy Cline plaintive dreaminess while “Just Looking” is a throwback to Bobby Gentry in the 1960s. There’s even a requisite alt-country duet called “Today’s Another Yesterday” featuring Luke Doucet which moves sleepily along without putting the listener into a coma. 
 
The title track tastes like Country at first listen but upon further inspection recalls Southern California’s era of female pop artists like Rita Coolidge, Maria Muldaur and specifically Linda Ronstadt. Emma-Lee mentions a Stevie Nicks approach in her bio but she’s a much better vocalist than Nicks ever was. Her vocal style is diverse and devoid of all the annoying ‘modern chick’ trappings like Sarah McLachlan’s ‘hiccup’ or Feist’s twelve-year old girl coquettishness. 
 
The entire record is incredibly well produced by Emma-Lee, Marc Rogers (LMT Connection) and Karen Kosowski and features no less than 17 guest musicians adding organic instrumentation like organ, mandolin, trumpets, flugelhorn, and authentic strings like violin and viola. 
 
Emma-Lee is a fresh new force to be reckoned with and 2012 promises to be a stellar year for her if the album is given a chance to grow on listeners.

ORGANIC ORBIT: Divisions
Independent

The music business is a perfect place to use that old adage ‘never judge a book by its cover’. In the case of Organic Orbit we mean the CD cover of Divisions. The Kelly Eros artwork shows a tree that is green with life from a summer sun pouring down on the left side juxtaposed against a dying and decaying lifeless husk on the right. One is summer life, the other is dormant winter. With the name, the title and the image wrapped together I fully expected this to be an acoustic folk record or some sorrowfully turgid piano opera. 
 
Instead, the tree’s yin and yang imagery represents Edmonton, Alberta singer/guitarist Ryan Cameron and bassist Marc Limoges as stylistic chameleons who have somehow managed to cleverly stitch together, Frankenstein-like, two genres that have rarely met in mixed company; 1980s synth pop and 21st century nu-metal/punk.

It works to great effect. Imagine New Order meets Sum 41. Imagine Men Without Hats meets Billy Talent. Imagine Yazoo meets Nine Inch Nails.  
 
Cameron presents us with Weezer/Simple Plan/Treble Charger soaring pop vocal chops while songs bounce around from aggressive rock to stilted Euro-dance (“Tribal Tremor”, “Disco Biscuits”, “Coldust” and “The Sound”). The album finds its two greatest moments in “Brave”, a straight up pop ballad that could have fit comfortably on any Modern Rock radio playlist from the past five years and “Candyman” which marries No Doubt’s “Hella Good” with Billy Talent’s aggressiveness.  
 
There’s also a lengthy post-grunge anthem that closes out the album entitled “Broken Lives & Twisted Dreams” featuring Shaun Armstrong who does his best Mike Patton (Faith No More) vocal impersonation. The song creeps up on you and builds into an apocalyptic frenzy to punctuate the end of the album. 
 
My only complaint with this album is that the 1990s dated drum programming is intrusive on most of the tracks. It goes from gimmick to annoying in about three songs flat. Nothing wrong with a drum machine (especially in the context of these songs), but on several of the tracks it walks on top of or interferes with the other instruments. A drum loop with real drum samples on top, which would fit into the duo’s self-produced ethos (and, I imagine, budget) would serve the songs better. The success of 1980’s synth pop was its minimal use of such devices. 
 
Regardless, the listener is in for a mind-fuck of musical genre cross-breeding on every track. I hope they can continue with the experiment and expand those horizons even further on the next release.  This is pioneering work and Organic Orbit might just be leading the charge. Oh, and they perform live as well which I’m looking forward to seeing should they make it as far east as Cashbox Canada land.