Review Summary: An easy and accessible album of trip-hop marred in parts only by its lyrical content.
Emptyself’s most endearing characteristics stem from its simplicity. Repeatedly the songs combine acoustic guitar with trip hop influenced beats and prominent vocal melodies. These aspects create an immediately catchy formulae as the vocals and guitar together hook the listener, backed by the relaxing, spacey beats. As the album continues it knits together into a relatively expansive soundscape which, while slightly at odds with the prominence of the vocals is still very enjoyable.
From start to finish the guitar work on this album remains simple, yet it manages to continually conjure new and interesting hooks that never become old. This is quite an accomplishment in my opinion for an album such as this that employs very few changes in texture related to the guitar. Throughout it is one single sound with very little manipulation (except for the distorted guitar break on Liberated) and I think this plays strongly to the compositions strong points. It tries to be nothing else than what it is and in this it captures its own niche.
In context with other trip-hop albums I’ve heard, Emptyself is noticeably less dark and more upbeat. Continually it features beats that are on average faster than that heard on mainstay trip-hop albums such as Tricky’s Maxinquaye and Massive Attack’s Mezzanine. What it accomplishes that sets it apart from the mainstream is the amazing amount of space the electronic components manage to create from such a small pool of resources. In many of these songs there is little space for the beats to spread and become more complex; this being the way I generally find other artists accomplish this. And yet a sense of space is still created in this album, which is something that should be commended.
Harkening back to the atmospheric differences between Emptyself and many other trip-hop artists, the more upbeat atmosphere does not carry over into the lyrics. In a stark contrast the lyrical content is often morbid in a grounded and worldly sense, something you would not initially take from much of the musical content. This passage taken from ‘Phantoms in the Sky’ exemplifies this.
“How 'bout you ignore the world beyond our shores
And leave the rest to me, so you won't feel guilty
See I'm a guy like you, easily confused
So I stick to my guns, and god tells me where to shoot
And angels guide the bombs straight to guilty homes
So when they hit a child it was probably in the wrong
To you they look the same one threat with different names
As long as we're at war, we can count on your support”
Clearly this is commentary upon the world as it stands, and particularly on America and other Western powers. Yet this depressing passage is accompanied by a relatively fast beat (in the context of trip-hop) that contrasts many of the classic examples in the genre. The tone of the vocals is what I would describe as almost sedated and not overly sad or downtrodden, as if coming from a place where the state of the world is just overwhelming.
These are all interesting characteristics that set this album apart from the typical in my mind. However while the lyrical content quoted above is perfectly valid commentary, I think it also strays too close to becoming preachy at times. Particularly in ‘The Postulate‘ it passes into what I think is a little too judgemental with the passage
“and I pray every day, for the praying to end, and I'm sorry to say that we've been deceived, my friends, again and again.”
This detracts from the song, and from the album as a whole for me. It’s such an accessible and catchy collection of songs and this niggling issue is one of the only parts that has bothered me over the years of listening to this album. To its credit however it straddles this issue far better than Emptyself’s creators other project Cire, which more frequently comes across as strongly judgemental.
Ultimately Emptyself’s debut album is a great listen. What it may lack at times in lyrical judgement is made up for by the beautiful simplicity of its compositions, each of which stand on their own as catchy and memorable pieces that will constantly stick in your head. From my personal experience these songs also have great longevity, in that I have listened to this album many, many times over the years since I discovered it and they have not yet become stale. This is an album that shows great merit, and boded well for Emptyself’s future endeavours.
