Review: Emilie Autumn - Fight Like A Girl (And An Open Letter)

Creative Stagnation! The Musical

Emilie Autumn's had a lot of problems in her life, you know. I know this because she pours out her difficulties in her music, turning her lyrics into a confessional stream of cathartic anger, violence and righteous fury. In theory. In practice, I listened to her previous album, Opheliac, and found it to be a rather enjoyable album, even if the lyrics were my least favourite part of it. Ms. Autumn has, if I may be blunt about it, no finesse. She seemed to have no concept of making lyrics more vague and therefore, more relatable and profound. But this was something I could easily overlook, because the music, a combination of romanticised Steampunk British Victoriana and industrial/electronica, was innovative and skillfully implemented and good gothic fun, if you didn't mind the ham-handedness or repetitiveness of the words.

So now we've got Fight Like A Girl, which Emilie Autumn's website proudly announces is musical theatre, and damn proud of it. Well, I'm not really a fan of musical theatre, Ms. Autumn. And good thing too, because if I were looking for musical theatre, I'd be a little bit disappointed with this cack-handed, stupid, insulting pantomime.

Things get off to a flying start with the title track, which has a synth bass riff remarkably redolent of "Misery Loves Company" off her previous, more enjoyable album. It has a chorus about annihilating 49% of humanity, which flows terribly, and it's about a minute and a half too long. Not great. Not a bad song, mind you, but not great. Which is a crying shame, because it's all downhill from there.

The problem with Emilie Autumn, as far as I can see it, is that although her "Victoriandustrial" style is interesting, and has a lot of potential, she doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Her violin work is excellent, but it takes a back seat on this album, to make way for songs that are written with Broadway in mind, but sit rather uncomfortably on a quote-unquote "rock" album. The songs show a rather annoying lack of natural progression, and the bad habit of repeating a lyrical witticism until all wit and meaning to the phrase that was the occasional fly in the ointment on the last album ("You're so easy to read, but the book is boring me") is back again, on pretty much every song.

So, Ms. Autumn, if I may speak directly:

I know you can do better than this. You've shown so much potential. Laced/Unlaced was a great album. Opheliac had some absolutely brilliant songs (the execrably bad "I Know Where You Sleep" notwithstanding), there were flashes of truly profound lyricism, such as "Thank God I'm Pretty" and "Let The Record Show" was an excellent industrial song. Fight Like A Girl, by contrast, seems to have taken the previous album and stripped out, for the most part, the Gothic aroma, the literary-mindedness, and replaced it with a Broadway musical sensibility which is at best tacky and at worst comes across as selling out really hard.

The Steampunk style, which you, with your first few releases, gave such a timely Victorian Gothic-Revival spin on, is something with vast potential that always seems frustrated. Some luminaries have taken advantage of it, for instance Dr. Steel, whose entire output is a bald-headed barrel of fun. Johnny Hollow are just as good. Your Victorian Nightmare Asylum aesthetic, with its rats and leeches and white coats and harpsichords and righteous insanity, is so wonderfully evocative. There are so few artists these days willing to commit themselves so wholeheartedly to a well-thought-through image, which is such a huge part of rock n' roll. With this album, you do yourself an enormous disservice.

3/10

Review: A Storm Of Light - Nations To Flames

Following the recent resurgence in the popularity among the heavy metal community for slower, more atmospheric, doomier fare, there's been a gratifying glut of releases characterised as "Stoner" "Post-metal" "Sludge" and so forth, which, for those of you unaccustomed to metal-magazine jargon, means low, slow and concerned with moods of desolation and nihilism. And it's about bloody time this new Renaissance of metal bands with actual songwriting talent got some recognition. So, for what it's worth, here's some glowing praise. 

With that in mind, here's the fourth album from American Sludge/Post/Doom/And So Forth metal band A Storm Of Light. And it's a fucking corker. Right from the opening moment of "Fall", Nations To Flames starts an avalanche of stumbling, cascading guitars, vocals that crackle with rage, and absolutely sublime ambient keyboard drones that create a real sense of what heavy metal is supposed to make you feel: So righteously goddamn angry you could take a sledgehammer to the face of The Man, wherever that bastard's hiding, but it'll have to wait a second because I want to listen to this absolutely delicious riff.

The mercurial presence of Soundgarden guitar-torturer Kim Thayil on this album (and old Kim's become something of a post-metal touchstone, with his involvement with Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson of Sunn O))), Boris, and Ascend of the Southern Lord Records Scene. Who are A Storm Of Light signed to? Answers on a postcard) adds a delightful frisson of rock-star attitude to three of the songs on this album. His shrieking solos, which hit the exact sweet-spot a lead guitar should, are superbly well-timed to erupt at moments when things are getting a bit too po-faced, or worse, threatening to denigrate into the same tired old hardcore-influenced chugging we've heard before. A Storm Of Light, clearly well on their way to becoming masters of their craft, know to avoid such overused metal tropes and side-step them adroitly. 

Which isn't to say that this isn't for everyone; if I had a friend whose knowledge of heaviness began and ended with Pantera (and I have many such friends) then I'd have absolutely no qualms recommending Nations To Flames. Then again, if I had a friend who was familiar with such luminaries as Isis, Neurosis, Jesu, and so on, I'd happily recommend A Storm Of Light to them as well (if they hadn't already heard of them). This album is probably A Storm Of Light's heaviest to date - the vocals of singer Josh Graham put one in mind of Scott "Wino" Weinrich, and the electronics are decidedly more in the raw, more industrial sounding vein than on their previous efforts. It all comes together to have a terrific sense of emotional honesty and genuine fury to the material. 

That said, this album isn't without it's faults. It can be a little touch exacting at times, with a few of the songs being a bit too similar and sounding unnecessarily padded. It's a minor nit-pick, however, and it's not going to turn anyone off. So if you're a metal fan and you are (quite justifiably) sick of the tyranny of Kerrang!-style bores (naming no names, so Children Of Bodom don't sue me) or of derivative, Neanderthal frat-boy thrash posers (again naming no names, so Municipal Waste don't sue me) then you could find an excellent start with A Storm Of Light's Nations To Flames. 

8/10