On “My Beloved”, the opening track on Emily Jane White’s fourth album, you can hear each breath she takes. “You are the master!” she declares on the bridge, punctuating each syllable with long inhalations and slurring one line into the next with a whispery exhalation. The effect is like hearing a guitar player’s fingers slide across strings: It reinforces the idea of the voice as a physical instrument, limited by the body that creates it and unadulterated by any studio adjustments. Including and accentuating those breaths is an easy yet effective vocal technique to convey intimacy and spontaneity, as though you could play “My Beloved” again and it might sound subtly, eerily different.
“Spontaneous” is the key word there. Blood/Lines is White’s fourth album in four years. She pieced these nine songs (eleven, if you count the two bonus tracks on the U.S. version) from more than one hundred song sketches penned during a 22-month period, and she recorded them with a small group of collaborators that includes Marissa Nadler. Those are her "oohs"in the background of “Faster Than the Devil”, adding a lush cushion for the thundering two-note guitar line and White’s race with her own demons.
By its very Frankenstein nature, Blood/Lines doesn’t hold together quite as well as White’s previous albums. It sprawls and stretches, prizing sustained melancholy over concise arrangements. And yet, that rocky quality only reinforces the volatile emotions embedded in her lyrics and underscores both the vulnerability of her vocals and their prickly resolve. Those two extremes, along with her downcast arrangements and breathy vocals, have earned White endless comparisons with Hope Sandoval and PJ Harvey, two musicians who have proved especially influential to subsequent generations of female musicians. Yet, in its personal scope and its emphasis on a live sound, this music is resolutely Californian in nature, a bleaker version of West Coast country rock: Big Sur goth.
Blood/Lines is best when White finds different ways to achieve that darkly dramatic sound. She drapes these songs in a heavy tapestry of reverb, which threatens to swallow the instruments whole. As a result, the guitar sounds especially sinister, the cello sloshes like rising water, the piano needles and cajoles the listener. The synths and especially the chimes, on the other hand, come across as rote, obligatory: shorthand for easy melancholy. “Wake”, one of the more musically involved numbers, stops cold to indulge some doo wop vocals on the bridge, and the transition is jarring in the best way: unexpected, yet apt, which throws the song in sharp relief. Rather than explore those contrasts, however, the song simply reverts to form, building gradually to a fairly predictable organ-drenched climax.
On its lengthy intro “My Beloved” lets every instrument—guitar, cello, piano—take turns with the lead, as if each is an actor taking a bow. It’s another way to reinforce the live quality of the music, and the friction it creates between the distancing reverb. White alternately invites listeners into her world and keeps them at arms’ length, and that toggling between direct confession and emotional opacity illuminates the best moments on Blood/Lines. She comes across like an artist who makes music by constantly calculating what to give her audience and what to withhold.
