“Road trip album” usually connotes an element of escape from everyday life, but on Highway to Hell, the journey is in the ordinary and inescapable. While Emily Moales’ earlier works as Star Moles fixated on science fiction and Medieval literature, she’s come down to earth on her latest record, using stripped-back psychedelia to mythologize the mundane.
On Highway To Hell, Moales sounds looser and more confident than she ever has, exhibiting a counterintuitive control, the kind that only comes by letting go. Oftentimes, the most self-assured lyrics on Highway to Hell are the ones delivered with the least certainty. Moales makes for a sympathetic and keenly observant narrator, deeply tapped into the universe she’s at the whims of. She sings, “Whatever I do, I do for the right reasons,” and you want to believe her, even if she doesn’t seem to fully believe herself. On the dreamy country ballad “Spinning,” she wonders, “How much of my life have I squandered?” but doesn’t bother with answers.
Moales contends with her own powerlessness with idiosyncratic ease. Absurdity, cynicism, and tenderness collide and ripple across the placid surfaces of her delicate folk arrangements—think Stephen Malkmus by way of Weyes Blood. “I need you like I need a hole in my head,” she remarks on “Overdog,” before immediately flipping the expression’s meaning in her elaboration: “I need a hole in my head / How else could I sing?” Her songwriting latches onto images with the arbitrariness and sneaky meaning-making of memory itself. The narrator’s nostalgia for someone no longer in their life is captured in the tangibility of “a Japanese soda and some candy-smelling soap.” Paralyzing anxiety is a fight with “a bagel machine” during a hazy, slow-building dream-pop song. An aside about Shoe Diva being “that girl forever, riding on the back of a black horse through Teen Vogue magazine” pops up in a hooky-playing celebration of ambivalence that showcases the upper reaches of Moales’ vocal range and knack for Laurel Canyon kitsch.
Highway to Hell was produced by Moales’ longtime collaborator, Rubber Band Gun’s Kevin Basko, at his Historic New Jersey recording studio. His production is vast and spacious, giving Moales’ voice and its accompaniment ample room to run around, to really play. It’s hard not to feel a smile stretch across your face as Moales taunts with utmost seriousness, “You just messed with the postmaster general / the four-star postmaster general.” She’s like a kid roping her friends into some make-believe game where she’s crowned herself king of everything. Listening to the jaunty penultimate track “Skip the Party” feels like watching Anthony Bourdain walk around Times Square smoking a cigarette as the sun sets.
At the peak of Highway to Hell’s longest and slowest song—a piano ballad called “Control Freak”—Moales admits, “My man makes me look like a fool / And it’s beautiful / And it’s a good look on me.” There’s something about being in love that makes dignity seem overrated, and Moales sums it up in this one perfect line. Sewn into the track’s throughline of understanding and self-recognition through someone else is the quiet devastation of the inability to ever get far enough into someone else’s mind, of the necessary and devastating mystery of individual experience. Like Hope Sandoval wanting to “hold the hand inside you” or Kate Bush begging to switch places with her lover, Moales is constantly reaching for something impossible—whether that’s her lover’s physical or metaphysical being or the bottom of her vocal range as she drags the phrase “I’m a control freak” across its gravelly floor. The songs on Highway to Hell are quietly thrilling in their repeated futile struggles for agency over circumstances beyond Moales’ control.
“If I put my shirt on backwards one more time / I swear this will be the darkest Tuesday in a thousand years” is an instant classic opening line. It kicks off a track titled “The End,” accompanied by a piano riff reminiscent of the one in Fatboy Slim’s “Praise You.” Despite (or perhaps because of) its title and closing credits feel, “The End” is the perfect opener for a record whose central road trip is along a möbius strip. “If I have it in my power / This will be the end / According to me,” Moales sings. It’s declarative and defiant, though it flies in the face of itself. As the rest of the record goes to show, it’s not in Moales’ power, and it’s not the end. She’s beholden to the limiting forces of time and money and inconvenient emotions, burdened with the knowledge that even her best decisions are shadowed by roads not taken. Moales wrote in Highway to Hell’s liner notes, “This is purgatorio.” Heaven and hell exist in moments scattered at random throughout time, with plenty of space in between to speculate, to play pretend. [Historic New Jersey]
Grace Robins-Somerville is a writer from Brooklyn. Her work has appeared in Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Alternative, ANTICS, Marvin, Swim Into The Sound and her “mostly about music” newsletter, Our Band Could Be Your Wife.
