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That girl has got me all messed up...
by Kurt Hemon
Elizabeth Elmore has one of those voices - the sort that sinks in and creeps around in your head forever, riding its aching mellifluousness straight into your heart, tugging at you, pulling you in. If a boy isn’t careful he might just (gulp) fall in love. I’d first heard her (and, yes, yes, yes, I fell in love - these are the warnings of a man already too far gone) on a Sarge (her previous band) record about four years back and I’ve never really gotten over her. The Reputation is Elmore’s new band and on its nifty debut record she does nothing to send my heart a-packing back to me. The girl still owns it, and I don’t care - she can have it. I want her to have it. I surrender. But this time around it isn’t just her voice, in fact it never was just her voice that mattered, because the girl has always been able to twirl a lyric around a high-speed pop racket like few others. Yet, nothing she’d done prior to this new disc would have prepared me for the sly touches, the fast maturing approach to her songwriting, the slowing paces, and the refined nuances of her honeyed and hurt vocals. And although the songs here are nearly all exceptional, it’s still that goddamn voice that gets me. What can I say? I’m a sucker for a girl whose voice can be smart, savvy, confident, and vulnerable all in the breath of a single phrase.
Anyone who knows me will tell you that I’ve always been a bit snobbish about that sort of thing - rockroll girl vocals. Which is a funny thing because I have always been a sucker for a girl’s voice (I can still hear Cyndi Sech, the first girl to ever call me on the phone way back in the sixth grade...35 years old and I still dream of that voice - Christ man, what is wrong with me?) But I’ve always been selective about the rockroll girls I’ll listen to (PJ Harvey, Joanie Jett - there are those) so I guess I’m saying that maybe you should be impressed that I’m talking about this The Reputation record the way I am.
My fetish for Elmore’s voice, however, should not stand in the way of this record’s shimmer in any way. The girl sounds damn good - that’s a given, but she probably wouldn’t sound so good if she was singing anything less than the terrific songs that she writes (okay-yeah, I’d probably melt if she sang the fucking theme from Friends - but we’re trying to get past that now, okay?). Unlike her days in Sarge during which Elmore’s songs (in retrospect) always seemed to be ducking and hiding - buried behind rapid-fire guitars, dodging notice under rhythmic shifts, or simply sacrificing themselves for pure speed (as sharp as tracks like "Beguiling" and "Stall" were Elmore only hinted at what she was capable of) - The Reputation has the feel of a confident songwriter who wants nothing more than her songs to stand up, take the fore, and be noticed. By the time the record gets around to "She Turned Your Head" you start to understand that you’re hearing a songwriter who has started to fully grasp the enormity of her own talents. In the song Elmore develops a striking cinematic "boy-fucks-over-girl" scene that not only sucks you in with its savoir-faire and vitriol but also haunts you with its startlingly perfect arrangement. A trumpet (yeah, I said a fucking trumpet - listen to it, you’ll see what I’m saying) counters Elmore’s slow grinding bite with the quiet, sorrowful wail of hurt that you know lies underneath all of the tough girl attitude. The weeping sound of brass sits all over Elmore’s decrying that "you promised it was over and I took you at your word ‘til I caught the tail end of her ass slipping up your stairs". It’s a textural effect that takes the song from interesting to brilliant. Elmore’s in-your-face fuck-off anger boils over, she’s clearly pissed at the moment, but the hurt always turns to tears and she knows it. She’s been there before - too many times. It’s a high moment and an obvious highlight of the rockroll year 2002 thus far and it’ll be tough for anyone to top. But it isn’t the only such moment on this record either. The entire thing is a charismatic delight. Whether it’s Elmore parting ways with her past ("Either Coast"), turning her eye on the being caught between youth and yearning ("The Stars of Amateur Hour"), or singing the break-up songs that she sings so convincingly with a perfect pop pitch ("Alaskan"), it’s a record done with such an assured hand that the splashes of piano, trumpet, and bob and weave vocals seem to have always been a part of her arsenal - she’d just been saving them for the right time, and thankfully that time has come.
There’s a fantasy I have had since my first listen to The Reputation - it’s queer one to be sure, but probably sets a little something into perspective about this disc (what that is, I do not know - you tell me). I was mowing the lawn (I warned you this was pretty fucking lame) and listening to the disc when out of the blue the whole thing got quiet. Right off I’d thought the batteries had died on my crummy disc player, but after stopping the mower I’d noticed that wasn’t the case. A piano was playing a simple, gentle progression in my ears and Elmore was singing a ballad - which might be the first time we’ve heard her doing such a thing, at least in such a pure form. "The Uselessness of Friends" was the song and, although I hadn’t noticed, I had moved over to the steps on the side of my house and sat down to listen. I sat there and stared at the mower sitting in the middle of a cool, sun-drenched yard and drifted off into this place where I was thirteen years old again (Christ, this reads even queerer than I’d thought!) and at a roller rink - with little Lizzy Elmore. We were an odd couple, having few friends save for each other, and were skating around on one of those infamous adolescent "couple" skates. After a few spins around the rink, with her own future song playing out as "ours", she reaches out and takes my hand to hold. And then that tingle flushes over me; that awkward, wonderful giddiness in the middle of your body that, at the time, seems to be one of the nicer promises that life would forever keep.
But it doesn’t. Those feelings wind up the fleeting and ghostly moments that age and unfortunate wisdom erase with their acquired cynicism. Promises made, promises broken - Elizabeth Elmore, years ago, used to sing about the subject with a girlish naiveté that could only make you smile. Now she sings about them with the hard-earned shrewdness of someone who has been through the both of them one too many fucking times. The funny thing is she’s all the more beautiful for it.