You’ve simply got to love Emily Breeze. Advised to keep her age under wraps, approaching the milestone of 40, she went all Neil Young on us and instead made an entire album that pretty much focused on – and celebrated – getting older. Feisty. I love it.
It’s a great record too, from the opening strains of ‘Ordinary Life‘, in which Emily informs us that “I was a terrible waitress, and an even worse singer, but I…didn’t care!” over a hypnotic musical backing that recalls some of Saint Etienne‘s best work, and the whole thing comes across as somewhat euphoric. This theme is continued on the driving rhythms of ‘The Bell‘ with the defiant lyric “Fuck it, tomorrow’s gonna be alright!“
Things take a sleazier turn on ‘Anna Nicole‘, a nod to the tragic adult film star and model Anna Nicole Smith who died before her time at the age of 39. This one has the feel of an Anna Calvi number, or perhaps PJ Harvey at times. One thing I would suggest to anyone though, to avoid the same embarrassment that I had to endure, is to skip this one if you’re playing the album in the car while you’re giving a lift to your elderly mother or grandmother. 80 year olds aren’t generally accustomed to listening to other women singing lyrics, on a pretty noisy song, like “Striptease me, squeeze me between your thighs, you know how to please me” on journeys with their offspring. That was a mightily awkward silence, I can tell you.
‘Dance With The Rats‘ brings back that euphoria with an utterly jubilant melody and even more empowering spoken word part that is too good not to quote in full here: “Tomorrow we will fall dangerously in love with each other / ourselves and everything else / We will climb the network of filaments which scaffolds the entire universe / We will high five the aliens, and receive a standing ovation from the angels as we dance in the random interplay of chemicals and electron impulses with the atoms that make us, and our planet, and our Sun, and all of the suns and the gas and dust in interstellar space.”
As splendid as the music is on Rapture, it is absolutely the tremendous prose that Emily writes that truly make this album as wonderful as it is. Take ‘Part Of Me‘ as evidence: “Nobody cheered and nobody cried /The day the British Empire expired / Sid vicious and Shakespeare made love in the soft candle light / The Spice Girls were silent, The Kray twins had been gentrified /Princess Diana went undercover / She works at Anne Summers, she wears a disguise / Saville and Thatcher French kiss in the shower / And cheer on the left wing infights.”
Remarkable stuff, and I haven’t even mentioned the ‘Ronettes on downers’ brilliance of ‘Turn Me On‘. Frankly, Rapture is simply a cracker of an album and your record collection is a colder, emptier place without it.
