Mary Elizabeth Remington - 'In Embudo'
Taking influence from the raw beauty of traditional folk with its stripped-down, unpolished production, ‘In Embudo’ is both a mesmerising work of art and a work in progress. Made recording full live takes onto a 4-track in a small house edged up along the Rio Grande in Embudo, New Mexico, the songs here celebrate the “mistakes” that occur in live sessions with laughter, rustling, and fuzzy feedback. With featured appearances from Remington’s friends Adrianne Lenker and James Krivchenia of Big Thief, and Mat Davidson of Twain, the record shows equally what these talented artists can output in a more background role and that Remington is able to showcase her talented musicianship in her own right.
Brought up in a log cabin in Hardwick, Massachusetts and raised with an appreciation of the natural world, Mary Elizabeth Remington draws inspiration from the cycles and patterns of nature in colourful metaphors and vivid descriptions. The opening track ‘All Words’ has the effect of a Mary Oliver poem, showing the power that words have to open up our minds to the surrounding landscape. To not be passer-bys in this world but to absorb and marvel in its awe and mystery, echoing the childlike wonder of artists like Connie Converse and Vashti Bunyan.
All the instruments come together in bursts of colour with the meditative fingerpicking guitar melody infused with shaker percussion and the familiar sweetness of Adrianne Lenker’s background vocals. There are no sing-alongs and no readily apparent chorus. The track, like many others on the album, is very impressionistic and eschews traditional folk melodies for a discursive formlessness. The only repeated line that gives the track formality is “I don’t know what to say. All words mean many things.”
There are many other tracks that sound more like poems than songs. More than half of the tracks on here are acapellas and show the power of the voice in its pure form. ‘Dresser Hill’ is a duet between Remington and Lenker with faint chord strums heard in sporadic moments. They sing about a love that’s been lost and question the abstraction of the word love. ‘Mary Mary’ is another duet, but completely stripped of instrumentation. The harmonising here sounds almost too perfect and when that is realised, both artists break out in a fit of laughter. We then hear a backmasking of what sounds like Mat Davidson’s vocals.
The acapella tracks on ‘In Embudo’ do feel overused, though, and the gravitas of Remington’s voice, although proves to be on par with Adrianne Lenker’s, misses the accompaniment of the acoustic guitar that is so integral to the folk genre.
It is when the album makes full use of the breadth of artists featured on the album that it is most mesmerising. They make the album more varied and distinctive - sounding more like songs than blueprints. ‘Fire’, the lead single of the record, makes most use of percussion. The drum kit takes on a whole new form with block sounds, delicate snares, and a shimmer of cymbals. It’s a great track that echoes the place it was recorded in with its bubbling and shell-like rattles of percussion.
‘Holdfast’ takes on a more blues sound with Remington’s slow lulls, which are imitative of Fiona Apple’s, and a bouncy electronic rhythm and simple drumming pattern. ‘Wind Wind’ has an immaculate steel guitar melody that adds a tinge of Americana.
Overall, ‘In Embudo’ is a stunning debut album bursting with potential. It’s charming for its simplicity and rawness but what it misses is the mirroring of whimsical poetic appeal of the lyrics in its wealth of musical talent.
6.5/10
