Emily Fairlight - Mother Of Gloom (2019)

Emily Fairlight has a proper folk singer’s background having been, among other things, a teenage runaway adventurer in Australia and India, a circus school student, a barista and a runner turned jack-of-all-trades at a digital visual effects company.

Although its New Zealand rural Gothic/Texas borderlands feel make "Mother of Gloom" an elusive creature, the prevalence of acoustic guitar and intimate sharing of lived experience point to what Fairlight self-deprecatingly calls, “doom-folk”.

Her vocal style - a stark, haunting tone with a powerful vibrato, teak-hard yet soft as crushed velvet - elicits comparisons to PJ Harvey, Bridget St John, Emmylou Harris and Cat Power, musicians with distinctive voices and the lyrical power to conjure a kind of experiential realism.

"Mother of Gloom" can also stand its ground alongside the storytelling of Will Oldham and the soundscapes of Calexico. Each song is a timelessly elegant, albeit at times distressed, vignette, capturing the essence of a place, memory or feeling,
framed by a varied palette musical arrangements leaving space for the imagination between the sounds.