EMMA SWIFT – THE RESURRECTION GAME: REVIEW

EMMA SWIFT

The Resurrection Game (Tiny Ghost Records)

THIS IS AN ALBUM that exists, as Emma Swift puts it in the opening lines, between nothing and forever. Between the worst of times and the possibilities of everything else, between giving away the chance of recovery and trusting in the next step, between being alone when surrounded by others and being with others while just as happy alone. “Here comes the rain, there’s always the rain/Play the resurrection game,” she sings.

Love appears throughout, sometimes as a saviour, often as a sustainer, but it is not impervious to the other regular feature of these songs, the darkness in the corners, and sometimes in the centre, of our minds. And Swift, definitely not in her first emotional rodeo, a songwriter who has learned metaphorically at the feet of some more than decent songwriters and literally at the coalface of Bob Dylan songs (if you haven’t yet, please investigate her album of Dylan covers, Blonde On The Tracks) knows one thing very well: it is never as simple as find love, even self-love, and you fix the darkness.

I mean, really, how could it be? Have you seen the baggage we drag around? Even the bits we thought we had discarded or destroyed on some bonfire of the vanities at previous stages of “fixing” ourselves. Maybe especially those, as Swift explores in Catholic Girls Are Easy, where an upbringing in a religion that mainlines guilt and delegates responsibility keeps laying waste to good intentions.

(Just breaking into the conceptual bits for a sec: the way Catholic Girls Are Easy travels for the bulk of its five minutes in a smooth caress of breath and acoustic strum, and then in its final minute and a half brings piano, strings and upwardly winding stairs to grandeur, is just superb.)

Within this song, losing your virginity as a practical step (“In the back of a van, with my head against the door/It’s not what I imagined, but it’s what I came here for”) and the language of religious submission (“I have nothing much to offer/But all I have is yours”) mingle like skin and sweat, absorbed like breathing. You can see a lifetime’s pattern ahead, not just sex but strength (“You know what comes next/Yes, yes, yes”) and all those mixed messages become mixed metaphors.

Yet Swift is not one for blame-by-numbers any more than she is retailing some easy how-to for climbing out of debilitating darkness. The Resurrection Game, as might be told by the title, does see her coming out of the other side of that darkness but not with unmarked skin, not without the awareness that resurrection isn’t an end in itself. You see it in the broader philosophical point, but you also see it in little bits of byplay, such as in For You And Oblivion, which takes us from Inverness to Texas in the company of a foreclosing Christopher, with Swift rhyming “Houston in the summer/And the pavement’s on fire” with “I’m on the cusp of a crisis/But that’s nothing new squire”.

Scotland to Texas is a reasonable metaphor for this album’s musical end reference points incidentally, two places that have always been nominally opposites but actually cross-fertilising country and soul, as anyone who has dug into the music of Glasgow in particular knows all too well.

For You And Oblivion plays as a heat-enervated lullaby, a kind of extension of Nothing And Forever’s elegant Angelo Badalamenti-with-a-cheroot in a smoky bar mood, but No Happy Endings touches both Dusty Springfield in Swift’s phrasing and dusty floors in its shuffle and guitar. Signing Off With Love’s torch song comes to us in a velvet dress and strings, but you can see the toes of cowboy boots poking out underneath the hem, while Impossible Air somehow brings The Carpenters’ Solitaire to the corner table of a small wine bar, woodwind and all.

It’s all indicative of something that might not seem obvious looking at the topics and to a certain extent Emma Swift’s antecedents, or our assumptions. While her metier is the none-more-intimate slow song that hovers in that very small space between elegiac and bruised, on this record Swift plays the wider game: arrangements thickening, drama encouraged, and her voice going from a whisper to a … well, at the very least a firmly stated view.

The orchestration in Beautiful Ruins has a touch of Van Dyke Parks while the 1960s reference point for No Happy Endings is more rock singers in Nashville, and in both the voice arcs over it all while never feeling like she is being pushed. Going Where The Lonely Go goes heavy on the echo and tremolo in proper Gothic Western-style as a breathy Swift weaves in the spaces with confidence, but later, in How To Be Small, that breathiness feels vulnerable but in control, even when cresting the rising waves of strings-with-implications.

It’s been a rather rocky route to get here for Swift since 2020’s Blonde On The Tracks, and the alternative options offered to her personally and professionally can be discerned all the way through these 10 songs. But riding the waves of mood and music and momentum to exactly where she should land is what The Resurrection Game does so very well.

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Emma Swift’s The Resurrection Game is out on Friday, September 12