Send "Emily Jane White " Ringtones to your Cell 
| Pitchfork |
 Emily Jane White's singing voice, wispy and sweet but undercut with an alluring world-weary weight, lends itself to brow-furrowing introspection and rustic tales of woe. And there are more than a few songs like this on her second album, Victorian America. She doesn't go out of her way to invoke a comparison to Cat Power, but during certain moments it's difficult to not notice the flattering (albeit striking) resemblance. If dour tracks like "Never Dead" and "The Baby" don't outright mimic Chan Marshall's indomitable style, they're at least more than a little beholden to her.To White's credit, though, she doesn't let these impressions linger-- even at their most bathetic, her songs are buoyed with helpings of strings, pedal steel, and other instrumental touches that play their part without overstating their presence. The title track, a string-swept ballad that makes references to Hurricane Katrina, is a perfect example. Instead of overselling the drama, White maintains a certain distance from the emotion the song conveys, singing the lyrics in a stately and precise fashion. The musical accompaniment ably mimics this elegant pose, turning the song into something much more affecting. In comparison, an elegiac tear-soaked ballad like "The Ravens" opts to fully immerse itself in the tragedy of its broken-hearted subjects. "And so I walk the line," White sings, "to the beating of this never-ending lie," detailing in painstaking poetic fashion a love that was destined to die....full text |
| Kqed |
| It's fairly likely that you have never heard of Emily Jane White or her music, even though she is native to these parts (she grew up in Fort Bragg on the Mendocino coast, went to UC Santa Cruz, and lives in the Bay Area). Her first album, Dark Undercoat, was released in 2007 to critical acclaim and spawned a loyal, but limited following. She may not have name recognition in the states just yet, but that isn't the case in other parts of the globe: the French really, really dig her. With the release of her second album, Victorian America, which she recorded over three years in San Francisco and Oakland, she is bound to get the attention from her fellow countrymen that she deserves. In the album opener "Never Dead," we meet White on a particularly hard night on which "bad news blew right through [her]." Over mournful guitar chords, she pleads with the morning sun to come and wipe the sorrow away. Pretty somber territory for the first number, but White manages to instantly transport her listener to that particular dark corner of the heart. The mood does pick up though with "Stairs," a winding song that swerves and swells as it progresses, its tempo seamlessly morphing into something unexpected over and over again....full text |
| Slantmagazine |
| The sophomore slump is a generally overused concept, often invoked by critics to knock down acts who hadn't done anything worthwhile in the first place. There are also more banal forms of failure, and an artist's second album does have significance as the place where patterns first form, where tics become solidified, and nagging faults become serious problems. There are a lot of ways to stumble on your second outing, and Emily Jane White's method, retreading a sound that was already too little her own, is perhaps the most common. Like 2007's Dark Undercoat, Victorian America is an immaculately dusky exploration of Americana tropes, full of beautifully hushed vocals, dark and slithery subject matter, and the aching echo of slide guitar. As before, the whispery splendor of White's voice elevates the material, but it's troubling how similar the two albums are in tone and overall sound. Songs like the title track do break from the mold by varying White's now-standard vocal pattern, but their core elements and overall feel are largely the same. What the album achieves is further identifying the limited scope of her sound, which deals with such a specific stylistic palette as to have already been limited in the first place. And though the production is sterling and the material plied with completely convincing earnestness, its repetition is far too boring in a genre that's already crowded with this kind of thing. This means that there's a fully predictable slant to a song like "Liza," which hits all the right notes, from whispers of trembling violin to a creeping buildup, amplified by crackling guitar swooshes that swoop in at just the right moments. The creaking progression feels like the slow ascent of a small roller coaster at a local carnival: We know where this is heading, how it will end up, and that it won't be terribly exciting. That doesn't mean that there isn't some modest pleasure in riding them: There's a measure of sustained dreariness in the middling fulfillment of low expectations....full text |
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