There are times when the albums we review on W&H are so eclectic that attempts at genre pigeon-holing are utterly irrelevant. CHRISTY & EMILY'S third album 'No Rest' is such a creation. I'm only awkwardly choosing 'Post-Rock' because it's too futuristic to be standard 'indie' fare and far too damn strange to be classed as 'Alt. Country' even though it does dip its' toes into Americana-style balladry on a couple of occasions.
There again, when you examine the backgrounds of these two talented, but seemingly disparate characters, it's no surprise they conspire to write and perform such mercurial compositions. Christy Edwards learned to play guitar from a Metallica tablature book and is a well-known figure on the Alt. Rock scene in both Rhode Island and her current home town New York City as anyone who has seen her bands Lil' Fighters and The Totallys already knows. Emily Manzo was originally drafted in to Lil' Fighters when their original keyboard player Walter Martin left to tour with The Walkmen. Unlike Christy's DIY background, she's a classically trained pianist who's every bit as much at home in the New England Conservatory as the Knitting Factory.
Throw in the girls' two biggest fans – Faust's Joachim Irmler (who produces and releases 'No Rest' on his Klangbad label) and Nightingales frontman Robert Lloyd (who sneaked out their previous release 'Superstition' on his Big Print label last year) – and you've probably not got a team liable to follow Crystal Swing onto Ellen De Generes' show. Thank God.
There again, while I have a lot of respect for Faust's reputation as Krautrock trailblazers, I'm less partial to their penchant for industrial machinery, so I'm relieved to discover that Irmler's presence may have contributed to both the ominous feel of some of the tracks and the sometimes less-than-orthodox arrangements, but these ten tracks are very much songs in their own right. Indeed, they appeal because they seem to exist comfortably on a mezzanine floor between the esoteric and easily recognisable.
Perhaps for this reason, the album seems to revel in its' tug of war between darkness and light. Opening track 'Beast' belongs very firmly in the former camp. It's an oddball, brooding rocker of sorts, which dips and sweeps courtesy of its' Brazilian baiao rhythm, obsessive lyrics (“I'm not scared of the dark since the beast took me”) and an aromatic psychedelic edge which is only leavened by the girls' hypnotic vocal harmonies. More typical of the record as a whole, but even starker is the magnificent 'Guava Tree'. It's a beautifully-realised, elegiac track, but then it should be seeing as how it deals with both drugs (“through the night he and I did weave a golden yarn and in the morning I gingerly shot it in my arm”) and suicide (“I'll soon be with her, by the morning you shall see the faded figure of your youngest son hanging from the guava tree.”)
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Elsewhere, though, the album is just as keen to walk towards the light. 'Sundowner' – with its' tumbling, 'After the Goldrush' piano and wheezy harmonica – is close to a conventional Americana-tinged ballad and certainly none the worse for that. 'Idle Hands', too, is a stately affair, though it also has a whiff of Smog-like mystery about it and the closing 'Amaryllis' may apparently have borrowed some chords from Schubert and Liszt, but it equally willingly lets some Brian Wilson-style Californian sunshine in before it winds down.
'No Rest' is not an album interested in resting on its' laurels. It caresses and chastises, cajoles and surprises and it's ultimately as restless as its' title suggests. It's a fascinating third step on a journey in which the future is unwritten and the possible musical yield will remain constantly elusive.
Christy And Emily official site
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