Emily Jane White - Ode to Sentience
Ode to Sentience, the third album in as many years from critical darling and brooding "dark folk" singer/songwriter Emily Jane White, is another finely-crafted edition of self-described "reflective, contemplative songs." Recorded in her home town of San Francisco, White's stark, haunting music has found an appreciative audience in Europe where Sentience was released last fall (U.K.: February 7, U.S.: TBA), a more welcoming home, perhaps, to the album's lushly ethereal atmospheres and tense, fleeting beauty. "I’m drawn to writing sad songs”, she says matter of factly. "I'm OK with that." This is, after all, not an album of perky, moon-in-June pop, but a collection of intelligent songs that requires -- and rewards -- a listener who will actually take the time to listen.
"Take the veil from your face...do you walk with the human race", she sings on "The Law", a line of gorgeous, moody melancholy wrapped in a divine folk melody, spare acoustic backing yielding to piano chords of perfect progression. "Black Silk" is a lament of simple but extraordinary force, White's shadowy whisper of a voice equal parts warm, tender thoughtfulness and cool, airy tone of spectral foreboding. Ode's songs "speak to the emotional simplicity and complexity of human relationship," she says. "We all share the potency of music by having the capacity to feel, and I found the simplicity of this fact very beautiful."
Emily Jane White - "The Law" (from the album Ode to Sentience)
Emily Jane White - "Black Silk" (from the album Ode to Sentience)
Direct Current
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