In interviews ahead of the release of this second full-length LP, Emma-Jean Thackray has spoken more than once of how making it saved her life. That anyone could craft work so head-spinningly euphoric, so joyous and life-affirming, as a deliberate response to the unmooring felt following the death of their partner and amid an ongoing war with their own mental health, is a kind of miracle. But that’s just the start of what’s marvellous about this magnificent record.
In many ways its sound and style – typified by a questing musical omnivorousness, so an absence of any specific approach rather than the adoption of any single one – is a logical progression from Yellow, Thackray’s first LP proper, released in 2021. But Weirdo still feels like a stylistic surprise. In part this is the result of her decision to go back to an earlier mode of working, playing everything herself and recording at home, which was how she made her first EP, Ley Lines. Because her own talents are broad-based and numerous, and because she knows, understands and loves far more musics than those that easily fall within the jazz bracket she’s usually seen as operating in, Weirdo emerges as both an expected next step for Thackray, and at the same time the career equivalent of a high-speed handbrake turn.
You can’t pigeonhole it easily. For starters, Thackray uses her signature instrument – the trumpet – only sparingly. This feels a very consequential decision, the clean, strident, soaring sound almost entirely held back until towards the end, adding a sense of emergence and survival when at last she allows us to share its sonic uplift. It isn’t just her playing every instrument in the 1960s-TV-show-pastiche video for ‘Wanna Die’ that puts you in mind of OutKast circa Speakerboxxx/The Love Below: few artists have managed to inhabit as many genres at once, not just on a single album but within individual songs. If you wanted to give Weirdo a category, you’d have to make a new one up. Let’s call it a disco and P-Funk-inflected pop singer-songwriter album, then: but because it’s been made by a virtuoso multi-instrumentalist who’s grown up in British jazz’s emergent egalitarian improvisational tradition and has been surrounded and supported by what will surely be seen in due course as some of the greatest and most free-thinking musicians of all time, the results are therefore both expected and surprising, and never less than wonderful.
An unwavering commitment to excellence in musicianship and a lightness of compositional touch combine on every piece here to always exhilarating effect. Even the most complicated arrangements take flight with apparent effortlessness, in large part because they are fused with lyric-writing that prizes directness of communication over self-conscious poetics. Again and again Thackray hits hard and heavy through her startling and disarming economy of style. “I’m not whole any more, broken pieces on the floor,” she sings in the chorus of ‘Save Me’, a made-for-the-dancefloor belter which starts out like Afrobeat and ends up in Philly soul territory; the chorus of the helter-skelter, falling-over-itself ‘Wanna Die’ stacks words of only one or two syllables until they teeter into near collapse in an enjambed ending that disrupts what Stewart Lee would identify as the rhythm of the joke (“I am doing fine / I’m not gonna cry / I don’t wanna die / Except for all the times / I do”), simultaneously making it even funnier and even more of a punch to the guts.
Simply reading the track listing is enough to tell this perfectly executed concept album’s consistent, involving and ultimately empowering story. Some of the songs were written before her partner’s death and before Weirdo’s narrative existed: but it’s impossible to tell which ones without having them pointed out, testament to the thoroughness of the work completed here, and vindication of Thackray’s decision at the outset to tell Gilles Peterson and the rest of the Brownswood staff that they would have to leave her alone to get on with it and content themselves with hearing it when she’d finished the whole thing.
The individual songs are widescreen epics in their own right – even the ones where, if you judged them by their durations, you’d expect them to be interludes or skits. The record’s slightest moment – ‘Tofu’, two minutes and thirteen seconds of cyclical keyboards and snare rattle framing a descending vocal containing only the beancurd of the title and the occasional “oh” – works perfectly in its context, ahead of the even shorter ‘Fried Rice’ (“I wanna make fried rice / I don’t wanna go outside … Maybe then I’ll be alright”), comfort eating as shorthand for, and potential way out of, the depths of solitary depression. ‘What Is The Point’ lists things that you have to do but which don’t seem worth the effort when the person you normally do them with has gone, and stops abruptly in the middle of a purposefully directionless Minimoog solo, still short of two minutes.
Throughout, the writing and the execution are peerless, and not without considerable risk. ‘Where’d You Go’ – a full-length song, comprised of a series of questions not so much rhetorical as obvious, drives right up to the edge of banality until, just before halfway through, one final devastating query turns the thing on its head; the second half consists of a multi-tracked mantra (“I’m chasing shadows / Don’t know where you’ve gone”) underpinned by a superbly understated trumpet solo, deliberately buried a couple of floors down from the top of the skyscraper of a mix. ‘Maybe Nowhere’ – the result of Thackray “wondering what it sounds like to die” – starts out a loping beast built from moderately overdriven bass grumble, glittering guitar and room-shaking drums, and ends in a cascading overlap of instrumental layers that retain precision and clarity even as volume and intensity build to a final shuddering disintegration. ‘Remedy’ achieves its penultimate-track intention of signposting a way out of grief’s clutches by first adopting then subverting the cliches of self-help, standing transcendent on solid bass guitar bedrock as it shimmers into a sunlit coda that sets the spirit into a lark-like ascent.
She deals throughout in uplift and empowerment, both lyrics and music shining blazing floodlights into the darkest corners of her most despairing moments, showing us the routes she used to climb her way out and allowing us to follow her when we want or need to. It will not only be Thackray’s life that this superb LP will save.
