Emmy the Great lives up to her name

Emma-Lee Moss, AKA Emmy the Great, has had a great year. She’s released her strongest, and most immediate, album to date, Second Love. She’s also quite possibly pulled off the double, by releasing ‘Go Far’, a very strong contender for single of the year. To mark 2016 as a fine vintage, Moss has embarked on a little tour. Stopping off in Brighton, I made sure I was there to witness this very special performer in what is a very intimate space.

O Karmina opened the evening. Her brand of minimal keyboard-lead ballads was an intimate way to start proceedings. Her songs of love, loss and redemption resonated with the assembled mass, and when her ethereal vocals echoed around the Green Door Store you started to get an idea that this was going to be a special night. After a brief break CYTA took to the stage. This trio are purveyors of classic sounding rock with a contemporary feel. Throughout their set each member had to try and get a classic rock riff into a song. First up, it was the guitar riff from Pink Floyd’s ‘Breath’. Then, during a quieter piece, ‘Paradise City’ was slyly, and slowly, segued in, but the winner was the drummer who managed to get Queen’s ‘We Will Rock You’ into the outro of a gentle slow burner, that featured both O Karmina and Moss.

The majority of Moss’ set was culled from her recent album Second Love. However, there were plenty of surprises. Moss opened with ‘The Hypnotist’s Son’. When you’ve just released what is possibly your strongest album, playing an obscure B-Side might polarise/lose some of your crowd, but patches were singing along. After this, her band made up from the support acts, joined her on stage and they launched into ‘Part of Me’. The crowd responded with thunderous applause and yelps of joy. ‘Algorithm’ came, and went, the same as the first two. Then instead of continuing the momentum she had created Moss, decided to slow things down by asking “Who knows Soho? Well this is about Soho, but I had to change it from London to Singapore”. Then she went on to tells us a touching story about Singapore, temples, Instagram and giving tips to the God of the Underworld. Ultimately this was worth it as ‘Social Halo’ was up next. The crowd lapped this up and gave the biggest cheer of the night so far.

After a slew of recent tracks Moss played ‘City Song’ before launching into new track ‘Rapids’. Having only been out a few weeks, the crowd lapped it up and the super fans up front sang along. After this, Moss said “This is a cover” and played The Cranberries ‘Dream’ sung in Cantonese. It’s always a weird experience to hear a known song in a different language. When she had finished she asked the crowd to suggest any song for her to sing. My calls for ‘Go Far’ were drowned out and ‘MIA’ got a well-deserved outing, however before playing that she attempted ‘Trellick Tower’, conceding defeat she said “I’ll try it at the end, but you (pointing at a crowd member) will have to come on stage and sing it with me…” Then the band launched into ‘Swimming Pool’. This by far got the biggest cheer of the night. After ‘Swimming Pool’, Moss asked for the house lights to be put on and addressed the crowd, “2016 has been a bad year right? But there is only 26 days left…”. She spoke in detail about the passing of Leonard Cohen. While this was going on pieces of cards were passed among the crowd with lyrics to Cohen’s classic ‘The Anthem’. As the band played the crowd sung along. The phrase ‘goosebumps’ moment gets bandied about a lot, but this was definitely one of those. Moss closed the set with the title track from her debut album First Love. Afterwards there was that awkward moment when the band walk off and you wonder “will they come back?” Luckily they did. Moss’ rendition of ‘Trellick Tower’ was as ad-hoc as she promised, but instead of the member of the crowd joining her on the stage, Moss kept her in her line of vision and looked at her for prompts. The night was rounded off by ‘Paper Forest’, which felt fitting.

When Moss had finished singing ‘Paper Forest’ and the house lights came up everyone knew that we’d witnessed something special. We had all seen a musician, and songwriter, nearing the peak of her creative and live powers. She had delivered the goods and blew us away for over an hour, but at the same time had kept everything intimate and had spoken honestly to every member of the audience. On one hand you could say that her Cohen tribute was a bit schmaltzy-twee, but it was heart-felt and her introduction to it made it all the more thoughtful and provocative. What Moss does next is down to her but one thing has been made apparent. She’ll go far!
Nick Roseblade

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