I've already mentioned Emily Portman, and the wonderfully gothic murder ballads of The Glamoury, but she's got a new song out, "The Hinge of the Year" and it's absolutely astonishing.

Almost impossible to categorize, it's dreamy accoustic folk with gorgeous harmonies I suppose, but it's got an edge above and beyond what someone like Kate Bush searched for, it has a touch of XTC, you can hear the Beatles somewhere in it, but it is UTTERLY transcendent. Best song of the year doesn't come close to doing it justice, it's just remarkable.

http://emilyportman.bandcamp.com/

Painfully awful?

Did you start life as a wanker Jesse, or is it just years of practice?

if you dig this kind of music.
check out this guy .

i recorded 2 records for him at my studio and played drums for him on the recordings and live.

go to the music section and choose the 4th song. one of my favorites.

i think you'll like it alot.

http://www.danielleemusic.com/content/music

I didn't enjoy it and couldn't hear any of the things that you mention. I don't think it really deserves to compared to Kate Bush, XTC, Beatles.

First listen i hung on for 50 seconds. Gave it another chance and forced myself for just over 2 mins. It was hard work

yeah, you're a wanker if you don't agree with someone here. don't you know that jesse?


i didn't care for the song either

Well obviously I think you're wrong. Or you're not listening carefully enough, or maybe if you haven't come via the Glamoury you're missing something of the background to the music and what she's trying to do. You don't get many singers who can take elements of a traditional folk ballad and spin them into a crystalline commentary on modern urban isolation, backed with gorgeous harp and musical saw phrases and dreamy harmonies.

Emily Portman is a rare talent. She's a fine - arguably great - songwriter, a superb musician and arranger. Not just my opinion, I've appended one of very many great reviews of the Glamoury which happens to line up with my own assessment of it. You can listen to it or not, up to you, but I think you're wrong to dismiss it. Taking my points of comparison, she comes from the same musical points of reference as Mummer - English traditional folk music - but takes the subject matter past bucolic harvest moonery into a world of gothic nightmare; she vastly transcends Kate Bush's songwriting which with a very few exceptions is fairly trite but shares some elements of style; and the quality and simplicity of the arrangement - just guitar, harp and cello mostly - is as elegant and irreducible as anything George Martin executed for the mid period Beatles.

Again, it's up to you entirely what you make of the music, no-one is forcing anyone to listen to it, and my opinions are my own. In the "Other Music" board I'm posting "other music" I like, and I apologise for straying outside the consensus. I didn't know that wasn't allowed (please to provide me with the approved list of slightly edgy indie bands and my copy of SMiLE).

Though I do kind of resent being stalked by a misanthropic twat apparently on the basis I argued with him about politics a few days ago. Jesse: do me a favour and stop the playground sniping. As I've said, I'm not going to be bullied one way or another into ignoring you or responding, I'll do what I fancy, but it's tiresome and pointless.


"Emily Portman’s debut album is a rare and magnificent outpouring of creative imagination. Her songs are unique but flourish from the ancient, magical earth of European balladry and fairytale. She describes the collection as “new songs with old bones, old stories with new skin, drawn from folktales, ballads, dreams and real life.”

"Listening to them all in one sitting was as intense a musical experience as I can remember. You feel the tension between the dark content and Emily’s bright, almost innocent voice. The supernatural exists alongside the reality of Newcastle streetlife. The maverick melodies trip you up. You are lost in a dangerous nursery rhyme, too mesmerised to escape. Meanings are slippier than in the old ballads, but you begin to grasp a theme. Her heroines have bad things done to them – perhaps by an abusive husband or a jealous sister, perhaps just by life. But they survive somehow, even through rebirth or transformation. Emily is a young woman conveying a female experience.

"How to give a flavour of twelve startling songs in a few words? Bones And Feathers and Tongue-Tied are strong openers which use the age-old storytelling device of metamorphosis from human to animal. Little Longing (an aching lullaby for an unborn child) and Pretty Skin (with a devouring witch) are products of Emily’s dreams. Stick Stock finds Susie murdered and baked in pies by her stepmother, but her spirit sings out. It’s a perfect fit with Two Sisters, the only traditional song. Mossycoat is the glamoury in action: an enchantment that reveals beauty where before there was none. It’s based on a traditional tale from Northumbrian traveller Taimie Boswell. Emily also cites Angela Carter and Clarissa Pinkola Estes as inspirations.

"Those maverick melodies and the string-based musical arrangements are hugely important. They demand close attention, but are no distraction. They support Emily’s powerful lyrics by conveying danger, terror, longing, and wonder. Lucy Farrell’s viola and Rachel Newton’s harp (no human bones or strands of hair were used in its making) are especially influential, but there are fine contributions also from Christi Andropolis, David Newey, Rachael McShane, Gabriel Waite and Hinny Pawsey. The harmony singing of Lucy and Rachel adds to the rich texture.

"Emily has been best known for her work with The Devil’s Interval and Rubus, but the creativity revealed here puts her at the top table. The Glamoury demands the same attention as other great albums which haul you beyond the commonplace and beyond time, like The Incredible String Band’s The Hangman’s Beautiful Daughter, Mike and Lal Waterson’s Bright Phoebus, and Chris Wood’s The Lark Descending. If you want easy listening, there’s a shedload of young folkies adding a shot of jazz or a splash of swing to the old songs and tunes. Emily is something special."

bollocks :lol:
I am joking of course!

SOMEBODY is really ate up with it and has too much time on their hands.

can someone just NOT like something you like?

I like the windy-like sound that appears at 2:51. It sounds like a quena, an instrument from the South American Andes. I like string-laden songs. It's not a mainstream stuff. I might play it in the background while doing homework at home.

It's certainly not what I was expecting after the hype. ;)

I just think it's weird to compare her to Kate Bush and The Beatles. She's a 'folky' and neither of them were/are. In terms of originality of ideas and unique melodic talents she's not in the same league. Using a harp and some (beautiful) harmonies is not the same as writing great tunes. Lyrically she's better than a lot of stuff but it's all a bit predictable and a bit 'faux-ancient' for my liking. She's much more of a combination of Robin Williamson and Kate Rusby. However it's engaging and better than a lot of stuff, I was just expecting so much more based on the hyperbole.

No stalking going on here, or playground sniping (don't understand the misanthropic bit either), I just thought the Emily Portman stuff was painfully awful. Like James, I found her stuff overly self-conscious in its olde worldiness, the musical equivalent of a rustic kettle, and lacking in any songwriting nouse. All that angelic fairy voice coupled with, like, daaaark subject matter is all middle brow, Culture Show ready affectation. I always give anything in the Other Music section a listen; perhaps my comment was glib, but then it seemed a fitting way to undercut the hyperbole of your introduction.

BTW, the reason she's been consistently showered with praise is probably more to do with the niche market she occupies (and having the BBC hone in on you helps) and her ability to satisfy it rather than any widely recognised brilliance. I could collate a bunch of press releases that made the moldiest prog-rock band sound like the second coming.

Don't fear, she'll be on Jools Holland doing a 'mesmerising' performace before you can say 'Mojo magazine'.

Well I disagree with you Jesse, but isn't it nicer to discuss on the basis of a reasoned set of criticisms than misanthropic one-liners?

To be honest, we probably come from different musical directions, certainly so if you're preferring the material James put up in comparison which I gave a listen to and then politely passed over. I don't watch the Culture Show, and I don't read Mojo, and having discovered Emily Portman via a Generator CD I'd picked up at a gig, on which she stood out like a shining jewel against run of the mill indie, I bought the album on my own recommendation. So if the accusation is that I'm following some sort of middle brow hippy trail guided by the BBC, it's way off beam. I've been listening (and playing) traditional music since gleefully discovering Martin Carthy in the 1970s, and maybe that gives me a different vocabulary to work within? No idea, but I'm taken aback by your aggressive antagonism to what is, after all, just music you don't like.

This is the enigma with you really. It's very clear what you're against, but it's not at all clear what you're for. Since I turned up here a couple of years ago, I've been bemused at your casual misanthropy and hectoring style. You're like Jack Black in the Hi Fidelity (film version) music store, being needlessly unpleasant to people not coming up to your mark, which in itself is just a personal taste, not an absolute gold standard. You're obviously not stupid, so what is it with the temper?

Yes, there are people who like Emily Portman. I'm one of them, and it appears from the various comments here that that's as unusual here as not thinking Steve McQueen is the greatest album ever: so what? I can guarantee that anything you care to advance as great is not immune from criticism, and I can "undercut" with nasty one-liners just the same as you. But I don't understand why anyone would feel the need to do that. If you don't like it, go and listen to something you like.

Still not getting the misanthrope thing.... I wasn’t suggesting that you were following the BBC, that was in reference to the positive press you were quoting; the BBC always manages to generate a certain degree of underground hype about any artist they get they decide to get behind. I admitted that the nasty one liner wasn’t exactly ‘constructive’, but I am against the idea that only those things that you enjoy should be privately pursued and discussed. Culture is contestable, that’s partly what makes it breathe and how we form and develop our tastes. Whole artistic approaches are characterised as much by what they reject as what they affirm.

Agreed, music (or whatever else) isn’t a game of winners and losers, or literally a matter of life and death, but neither is it just music, in the sense of some personally enjoyable distraction from the genuinlly important stuff. You can still think that the wistful rural deluge coming from the South of England is a sign that pop music has never quite been as conservative as it is now, and that, in Britain at least, 'artistic' pop is ever more aligned with pretentious notions of authenticity and a white middle-class style poeticism, without succumbing to the crusty rock ‘n’ roll elitism of a Hi-Fidelity Jack Black.

In terms of what I’m for, all I can say is that it’s easier to remember the negative things people say rather than the positive.

Missed this post...I quite like the Portman stuff. Its absolutely folk music and if you like that kind of thing I think theres loads of stuff out there to dig into, Fairport Convention and the like I guess (or Beth Orton maybe at her least electronic).

Hinge of the Year is a good song.

The Kate Bush, XTC, Beatles references apply because theyre all pop acts who have at various times flirted with folk music. If you prefer Portmans music to the aforementioned then Id suggest listening to more folk music and less to boundary-pushing pop acts. Folk music remains a minority interest precisely because it rarely aspires to push the musical envelope (which is not to say there arent great songs and of course great musicianship within the folk tradition)...as an antidote to the constant drive of pop music to be up-to-the-minute, a bit of folk music goes a long way.

Can I advise everyone to click on the Daniel Lee site that James has provided and listen to the fourth song, its a great pop song beautifully sung...but no James, Lees music has no similarity whatsoever with Emily Portman (OK its got guitars and vocals), its contemporary American singer songwriter stuff.

That figures... B)

It is utterly transcendent, so hard to define. It's almost as if the song exists in a timeless half light between what is and isn't, implausible, half imagined, yet real.
I get the Beatles, XTC, Kate Bush thing, maybe even a little Roger Whittaker too (his early folk period), not the later commercial stuff.
The best song since last Thursday doesn't even come close.

Here's a rarely heard track from the aforementioned Whittaker (the 70's answer to Dylan, but transcendently so)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tx5G9kmj-Vw