Emily Jane White

Time moves slowly in Emily Jane White’s hometown of Fort Bragg, California, where in place of big-city shocks of excitement there stretches one drawn-out, stable truth, quiet and unflinching. You will live, Fort Bragg says, and then you will also assuredly die. Given the setting of her misty, woodland upbringing on the Mendocino Coast, it could be said that optimistic melancholy and isolation don’t merely suffuse Emily’s music, these elements are in her bones. Emily’s new album, Blood / Lines, is a collection of gorgeously dark song vignettes built on a foundation of reverbed emotion, rhythmic drive, and minor-key pop sensibility. Blood / Lines features less of the folk / rock minimalism that shaped Emily’s previous works. She layers synthesizer, electric guitar and multiple tracks of ethereal vocals into nine heavily affected scenes.