|
Format: CD
New: Call (512) 474-2500 to check in-store availability $14.98
Wish
Formats and Editions
More Info:
“I’m just a fire,” Emily Wells sings on her album Regards to the End, her ethereal warble floating over a backbeat of drums. “Burn everything in sight.” And so she does, in a new body of work that smolders and scorches, wounding and illuminating in equal turn. The polymathic composer, producer, and video artist explores the AIDS crisis, climate change, and her lived experience - as a queer musician from a long line of preachers, watching the world burn - in immaculately layered yet spare songs that impel the listener to be attuned, acting like a magnet on our attention.
Along with a roster of contributors including her father, a French horn player and former music minister, she builds the songs on Regards to the End from deliberate strata of vocals, synths, drums, piano, string instruments (violin, cello, bass), and wind instruments (clarinet, flute, French horn). The music is numinous in part because the listening experience is a resoundingly bodied one. Life - unsanitary, beautiful, persistent, brief - swells inside of every note.
Reviews:
- Pitchfork album review (7.2 score) – “Surprise and precision are Wells’ greatest assets as a composer, and Regards to the End is filled with both.”
- A Bandcamp “Essential Release” for March 4 – “These carefully constructed orchestral art-pop songs yearn and ache through struggle and survival, capturing emotional nuances and contradictions in exquisite detail.”
- Vinyl Me Please Album of the Week – “Emily Wells’ music has a way of being cathartic and expressive in ways that words alone cannot accurately convey.”
- An NPR Music “top 5 albums out on Feb. 25” – “[the songs] have a fury to them but also a real kind of delicacy and arty-ness”