Emma Geiger: Reverse Bloom | ★★★★ | Self-released | April 26
Emma Geiger, who moved to Durham from Los Angeles several years ago, is a singer-songwriter with a plainspoken but artfully decorated style and a clear, serene voice. She has described the title song on her second release, Reverse Bloom, as a sort of platonic breakup ballad. It exemplifies how to express heavy feelings with the lightest of touches.
Opening song “All Your Words” sets a slow, autumnal mood in the manner of Azure Ray, though the glamorous golden-age Hollywood strings that keep sweeping in are distinctly more Lana Del Rey, which is characteristic of the musical surprises embedded in these intimate songs.
“How do I move through myself and into something good?” Geiger sings, as judicious a lyricist as she is a musician, and she goes on to answer herself throughout the record.
Reverse Bloom is hypnotic without being insensate, ethereal yet precise, and it has a winning naturalness and simplicity—as the video for “Vines,” which finds Geiger touching grass and trees in a coastal field, attests. In addition to her acoustic guitar and synths, the band includes drummer Joe Westerlund, violinist Emma Kelly, and coproducer Conor Whelan, among other contributors who sensitively shaped the songs at Betty’s in Chapel Hill.
With “Empty,” Durham multi-instrumentalist Michael Grigoni’s pedal steel starts trailing Geiger like footprints over a hilly UK folk song, and her voice begins to braid together with Archer Boyette’s, their timbres so well matched you might guess that Geiger is harmonizing with herself. “Invite You” begins in strummed simplicity but ends as a cockeyed ’90s-indie groove, like Mary Timony with less ’tude or Slant 6 with more chops.
As for the answer to that question in “All Your Words,” perhaps it comes most clearly in the great opening line of the title track: “You break the silence with a song.”
Fitting alongside the likes of Grouper and Laura Veirs as well as local talents like Skylar Gudasz and Chessa Rich, this concise, grounded dream-pop record is a notably lucid take on the style, one that justly reflects the sudden pivots and strange contrasts of a person’s relatable yet unknowable emotional life.
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