According to holy writ there is a category of music, the Female Singer Songwriter, which has become overcrowded. Apparently everyone in this category is working to the same stagnant plan: a sort of Cat Power by numbers. If they’re not we’ll say they are any way, right?
It’s pure bullshit, of course, but thankfully no-one dissuaded Emily Haines. Knives Don’t Have Your Back, the Metric front-woman’s first publicly released solo project, may however be a victim of her own success. The album’s intimate focus on Haines’s uniformly breathy voice and adept piano playing could throw copy-and-paste categorists onto the wrong trail.
Sexual suicide, Emily might say. Certainly it would be unfair. What lies within is a highly individual collection of haunting elegies that have smouldered over several years rather than sprung up together. There’s no bandwagon; it’s a journey one foot in front of the other through some challenging personal landscapes. In particular, several songs (such as ‘Mostly Waving’) were written in 2002 after the death of her father, the jazz poet Paul Haines.
At no point does Knives ever meander lyrically or structurally. Precision is emphasised throughout – suggesting this was what life required at the time, or putting the slow process of artistic aggregation into relief. In fact Haines anchors her thoughts firmly in the cold banalities of everyday subsistence, giving real weight to each punch when it comes. It’s arguable that if these same songs had been delivered through a Thom Yorke existential wail or a Nick Cave snarl then fickle mankind would be raving about them and calling Knives the best thing since Sartre sicked up his sliced bread.
On its own merits, though, the album at points stands better comparison with Haines’s childhood heroes Robert Wyatt and Carla Bley, as well as making more than a nod to Neil Young – most obviously through sixth track ‘The Maid Needs a Maid’. Neither are Haines’s songs purely introspective as they allow their words to apply equally to shrewd observations on the wider world.
Passion and optimism are tempered by disillusionment – but, tellingly, never crushed. “We’re moderate, we modernise / till our Hell is a good life,” she notes in the opening track. As acerbically the call in ‘Doctor Blind’ is to treat a lover’s ‘lonesome lows’ with the ‘blue ones’ and the ‘dizzying highs’ with the ‘red ones’.
The pervasive enigma of human relationships prompts Haines in ‘Crowd Surf off a Cliff’ to lament: “Cursed with a love that you can’t express / it’s not for a fuck or a kiss.” In final song ‘Winning’, however, she weighs up the analogy of a wolf’s need of its pack against society’s inability to provide adequate solace for the daily grindstone. The advice: “Don’t even visit that place / they’ll sharpen their teeth on your smile.”
Knives may indeed not have our backs but, fittingly, the song / album ends with warm tranquillity and the hope that an escape from such fates is possible, sensing, “all our songs will be lullabies in no time.” A toast to that then, but in the meantime Emily Haines is a valuable awakening. - Alderson
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