Review: Emily Barker Channels Joni Mitchell With the Quiet Protest of 'A Dark Murmuration of Words'
If I were to attempt to write a Twitter-sized review of the new release from Australian-born and UK-based songwriter Emily Barker, I could easily just use the album's title, A Dark Murmuration of Words. The album, which drops Sept. 4 via Thirty Tigers, is definitely dark, the darkest explorations of Barker's career, a reflection of the times. And murmuration serves a double meaning. The literal defination of the world itself, used to describe a large flock of starlings flying in tight formation, echoes the environmental themes of many of the album's songs. The literary use of the word is used to describe the act of murmuring, speaking in a low voice, fits Barker's soft, sometimes fragile, vocal style.
As stated before, this is easily the most topical album of Barker's career, with a good portion of the ten songs touching on environmental issues, reflections on the broken world we leave for our children, and a look at the horrors of slavery, but moreso the injustice of continued servitude of African-Americans through historical revisionism and public policy.
The racial protest song is the album's strongest, both in terms of success and in the power of Barker's vocals. Accompanied in the song's verses only by a drum, there is a bit of a beat poetry quality to the lines, which also serves to put full emphasis on the searing lyrics. In an almost staccato cadence, Barker spits lines like “I'm a celebrated sinner with statues in the park. This world is made harder if your skin is dark”, and a line that is truly topical in the wake of debates about history vs. “heritage”, “I covered all my tracks in books on history. Justified my actions through anthropology. I chose what to remember and what we should forget...” It's a powerful song and, while hardly a feel-good live show favorite, I can see its intensity stilling an audience mid-set.
On another album highlight, “Strange Weather”, Barker returns to the near-whisper vocal style of most of her songs. Starting out as what sounds like a gentle love letter to a newborn, it turns quickly into a song about a mother speaking an apology to a child for the Earth she'll inherit because of the selfish and damaging actions of her ancestors. “There is much I wish to tell you when I walk you through the past, through the beautiful places we thought would always last.”
“The Woman Who Planted Trees” is a more adult song, about a woman whose arbor efforts help connect generations. “I can tell my age by the height of trees”, she sings, “by the years the stood, growing over me. When I saw a girl you planted seeds, and cast your love over me.” But later, she notes “from a prison cell, you dream of trees.”
There are plenty of other songs to recommend of A Dark Murmuration of Words. There really isn't a filler track on the album, and plenty of killer lines, from “we're made of stardust, oxygen and bones” on “When Stars Cannot Be Found” to the haunting piano-accompanied ballad “Sonogram” with its “time is my decay” to “Geography”, which gives the album its title with the line “me and my shadows in a flight path rhyme, a dark murmuration of words.”
This isn't an album for everyone. If you want your protest songs strident, in your face, and loud, you're going to be disappointed by Emily Barker. But if you enjoy the quiet, almost mournful, folk of Joni Mitchell, A Dark Murmuration of Words is an album you're going to want to have in your collection. It's Emily Barker's best solo album to date, and one that should be making an appearance in a number of year-end collections. Barring a historically good run of releases before December, it will certainly be in mine.