Emmy the Great - April / 月音

The Guardian 0

(Bella Union)
The artist’s lush fourth album, written between New York and Hong Kong, is a stirring exploration of different homes

There’s both pathos and power in not quite belonging to any one place: born and raised in Hong Kong, Emma-Lee Moss found fame in London before moving to the US in 2014. After Trump’s election, her roots called, and her fourth album was written between New York and Hong Kong, two worlds undergoing great change. “Are you looking for straight lines, in these liminal days?” asks the jaunty, bubblegum-poppy Dandelions/Liminal, American protest seen through the lens of Chinese Buddhism. On Chang-E, a cosmic rush of Asian-influenced strings and silvery seas of percussion, Moss explores Chinese-American connections through the myth of the beautiful queen who stole the elixir of youth and fled to the moon with a white rabbit (in 1969, Buzz Aldrin promised to “keep a close eye out for the bunny girl”).

Lush and exploratory, April / 月音 swirls Cantonese vocals, singing bowls, and samples of Hong Kong traffic lights into Moss’s folk-pop, and is all the more stirring for never really finding a safe resting place. In 2019, as Hong Kong erupted against China’s imposition of new security laws, Moss left with her baby daughter, whose voice bubbles up on the light, bright Heart Sutra – belonging finally found in forward motion: “I’m going to walk out of here/All open and clear.”