Scout Niblett's latest album opens with a murder ballad, "Gun", which reveals its call-to-vengeance line-by-line. It begins uninnocently enough, arming up, then moving to intent, and finally motive: "Maybe you'll be holding her hand/ Or watching her shitty band," she snarls, drawing out "band" in a way that displays the full plumage of her disgust. She strums slowly, unfancily, as she recounts a lover's bed-hopping betrayal. Then there's the shot-- "HA!" and a grunge-glorious bridge with the big reveal, "She took your love away from me/ And I am thankful." She wants him back as much as she wants him gone.
It's Up to Emma, Scout Niblett's seventh, is her best album since her debut, full of raw power as it follows the aftermath of a toxic relationship through the various Kübler-Ross stages, alternately restless and rutting, psychotic and clear, murderous and devoted. Niblett fashions a compelling arc for the kind of character we know colloquially in popular culture as "the psycho ex-girlfriend." Niblett inhabits the story, first person: "I fooled myself for too long." "I wish that you could find what you need." "I still remain by your side." "I don't need to hear her name." "What can I do?" She gives it breadth and depth that expands the character, humanizing the caricature of the done-wrong, bunny-boiling bitch that just can't get over getting dumped.
Not unlike Lungfish, Niblett has worked her particular brand of blues to a science. Record to record, there's a reliable similarity that is either finessed or stripped back. It's Up to Emma is her first without Steve Albini producing, and is markedly fancier for it; a bit of an about-face from her last two that were so fitful and so raw. Even as harrowing and discomfiting an experience as Emma is, it's the most listenable record Niblett has made since her debut; caustic in a totally different way than usual.
The real work of this album is just how far she lures us into the this character's dark cocoon. She initially presents us with this vicious fantasy of a woman seeking to disrupt her misery by any means necessary, but it's also a fantasy about wresting control. The character is finding power where she can; in this gun, in this dream of offing her two-timer, in being glad he is gone, she gets to have the last word. She's not necessarily the sort of protagonist you'd want to relate to. Maybe not even the sort of character you'd want to hear define the hard edges of her confusion and agony for the better part of an hour. But Niblett does a masterful and most uncanny thing-- she turns us. She splays the guts of the matter, nuancing the petulant need and baby-why'd-you-go as it reconciles into something softer. By the end it's hard not to find resonance with it, even if you've never been a Heathcliff mewling on the moors.
As the album moves us through the aftermath, the mood doesn't particularly let up. Coming on the heels of "Gun", "Can't Fool Me Now" is about as much air as we get until the nearly seven-minute closer, "What Can I Do?" The song is a sort of secondary reckoning, a diagnosis, and is the album's real moment of ceremony: soaring strings and rolling kettle drums give some dynamic to Niblett's familiar guitar interval. There are fits of strings and percussion throughout that force things forward, but Emma mostly stays in the same place, these tense few chords repeating, with a spindly little note run or lead here, a little e-bow there. There's this drag to it, though; the down-tuned rumble of her unadorned guitar tone anchors the feeling that there is no escape, its stasis mirroring the album's relentless obsession.
Emma does offer redemption, though that implies that something has been transformed. Over the course of the record's story, the sense of who our heroine is-- or even that she is someone outside of the context of this man, this pain-- becomes evident. She goes from martyr ("I wish I could take the weight for both of us/ Sure did try to"), calling "My man... my man..." to the confusion of "Second Chance Dreams" where she confesses "I'm still getting wet" at the thought of reuniting with the man that's rejected her. On the penultimate "Could This Possibly Be?" she owns up to who she is, tied to this love, setting up "What Can I Do?" where both the singer and the listener see the "truth" of the situation: She has not been broken by this.
