Victorian America

VINYL FORMAT. Emily Jane White was raised in Fort Bragg, California, a seaside town nestled in the misty, secluded woodland of the Mendocino Coast where old men tell stories about logging and young girls dream of San Francisco. Time moves slowly in Fort Bragg, where in place of big-city sharp 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. Though Emily Jane White's newest album, Victorian America, was written largely in San Francisco and Oakland, the atmosphere of her upbringing permeates her songs. White has no patience with light fare. This pensive feeling was established with White's first album, Dark Undercoat, which critics and fans alike called a masterpiece; White herself is more inclined to call it a bare set of sketches. Conversely, Victorian America fills in the blank lines from Dark Undercoat with color, dynamics, orchestrations and a richer sense of poetics, the product of the three years' work. Lyrically, White's themes act like a devil on both shoulders who long ago killed off the angel. Victorian America, like the country it is banned for, is not an album that rests easy, nor does it exist for the sake of existing. From beginning to end, this is new mystic American songwriting at it finest.