Emily Jones
Album: Autumn Eye
Label: Self Released
Tracks: 7
Website: http://www.owltextures.co.uk

Emily's name will be most familiar to those readers who checked out last year's critically-acclaimed folk-horror album The Book Of The Lost, a collaboration with The Rowan Amber Mill. It turns out that she's the daughter of cult 60s psych-folk performer Al Jones (whose album Jonesville has just been reissued in expanded form by Ghosts In The Basement - see review elsewhere on this site): with whom she shares at very least a taste for the slightly weird in terms of artistic expression. Her press blurb states that she's still based in her native Cornwall, where she's been "secretly writing melodic yet disquieting songs for many years but only recently let a few of them escape out into the big wide world". I would therefore imagine that Autumn Eye is her first record release.

It's a beautiful, gold-cradled, hand-finished product, with glistening leaf attached to sleeve and full lyrics enclosed on insert; while the music within fairly glistens and glows too, with all the aura of autumn and its special seasonal colourings. The soundscape is for much of the time mightily dense and cluttered, although not unattractively so - the effect of listening to opening song Dark Moss And Coldheart is rather like wading through a thick ground-bed of fallen leaves amidst a woodland path walk. Emily's poetic lyrics are heavily rooted in the landscape, an environment that however is not to be trusted, for "sunlight deceives" and "black eyes are shining deep in the leaves", while up in the air there's "pieces of people floating around your house", even though "no-one likes to wear a ghost". Decidedly spooky and elusive, just like the ultra-imaginative instrumental colourings with which Emily surrounds her gorgeously evocative voice. It's a bit Trader-Horne perhaps, but not as precisely defined. Emily's own instrumental contributions aren't specified or detailed on the package, but her Bandcamp page informs us that there are "small but kind musical additions on some tracks from Jake Ashworth-Jones (keyboards), Paolo Sala (bass), Shelley Trower (flute) and Kemper Norton (harmonium and omnichord). Whatever, the soundscape is fulsome and often quite sweet, in a rather glorious, rich technicolor overkill, slightly distorted and you may think a mite excessively scored - but listen on in there, get the sounds into your head, drink deep of the comforting yet mildly disturbing cocoon that both reflects and expands Emily's sensational, highly sensory imagery.

Emily candidly says that "ideally the listener should be taken on a journey from storm to calm, via a bit of pretty strangeness. It may or may not have worked." Oh yes it has… and how!… This is truly fabulous.

David Kidman