Emma Guzmán - Something Less Than Alone (2022) Hi-Res

Still only 19, Michigan-based Emma Guzman already has two previous albums to her name but regards her new album as a new start. Something Less Than Alone is a collection of songs she began writing at 14, marking the transition into young queer adulthood with all its regrets, insecurities, joys and hopes for the future.

It kicks off with echoing resonant guitar underpinning the slow walking, moody Blue October with its poetic musing lyrics (“I walked for miles in another man’s clothes/The room was still when I awoke/The moon was full when we last spoke/I’ve stood my ground long enough/To feel the earth shaking/And I cannot keep your eyes dry/But I can feel their aching”), evocative perhaps of a David Lynch soundtrack.

Keeping things to a slow walking rhythm, Home is about exactly what it says, her house where “coffee drips before the dew” and “Fog hangs around thick like grandmother’s stew/We eat from an old copper spoon”, reflecting on the years passing (“I trace over marks of our heights on the wall/When she learned to walk and I learned to fall”) and of the eventual need to leave the nest (“The day will come when we strip these bricks bare”) but how “ghosts of the years linger on in the air/You can take everything but the heart is yet spared/A home keeps the stories it wears”.

A leaving song, Moving Along, maintains that slow, desert country feel. Again underlining her lyrical craft as she sings, “I went home first to visit and later to die/With no blood to fill in the space/She laughed but the wind brought a tear to her eye/Said what’s death got to do with a suitcase?” and how “There’s words for the winter and songs for the spring/Letters to burn and burdens to bring/But nothing compares to the lingering sting/Of moving along”. Indeed, lines like “They found my bones in the old junkyard/She was poised with her cold rifle cocked/It takes more than distance to bury the dead” reminded me of American author Alice Sebold.

She certainly has a literary background; on Love Bites, a dreamy slow sway song about the wreck of a relationship, she sings, “Your tears feel like the blood on my hands/You called me Lady Macbeth/Your nightmares hang like shrunken heads/Over this rotting bed” and signs off with the memorable line “I’ve been giving you love bites/But I’m the one bleeding to death”. Then there’s Hemingway with its gentle, bone-wearied vocal delivery and a voice beyond her years as she speaks of feeling lost as to her direction “My hills are not white elephants/They’re stones, and I don’t know which way to roll them yet/So I watch my breath drift across the cold April moonlight/With nowhere to run/I’ll try my hand at hiding in plain sight” and of lost love (“nothing’s been harder than watching her go …Did you creep out the door/Just to leave me here waiting”) and memories of another year gone and finding yourself adrift (“I hesitate to blow out the candles/There’s something so macabre about sealing the year with a wish of mine/You take off my blindfold/And I’ve pinned the tail so far away from home”).

A more uptempo track with indie-folk colours, Helen is a terrific sketch of a brief encounter (“Helen danced around the diner/Asked me if I’d like some cream/I said no, I’ll take my coffee black this morning/Cause she was pretty, and I wanted to make an impression”), of the feelings evoked (“At night I’m dreaming of Helen with her head in her hands/I hear the train call out in the distance…Am crazy, for wishing I was free like that?”) and again closing with a novelist’s sensibility (“One last glance across the galley/It’s the little things I’ll miss the most/I kiss the lipstick on my coffee cup farewell/I came for breakfast, I left with Helen’s ghost”).

She has a striking way with imagery; on the slow waltzing love song Today, for example, we get the emotional intensity of “I’d rip my hair out strand by strand/I’d walk the desert, bring back every grain of sand/I’d do anything I can/For you” and the nature of gossip and rumour (“They’ll learn your name and drag it around/’Til it’s dirty, hard and worn”) while Bullfrog is a marvellous self-loathing evocation of toxicity and a warning not to get involved (“don’t fall into me/I’m much less forgiving/Than the coldest waters/Than the life you’ve been living”), powerfully captured in “I am the old woman in beggar’s clothes/Clothes that stick right to the flesh/Flesh so tough you’d need a hammer/A hammer to break through to my soul”, as she cautions “Don’t bet on me/I’ll never be true”.

Another more uptempo track, some of her finest writing can be found on Bones and its character sketch of a woman whose life has been flushed down the gutter (“Right at the bottom of your pearl-studded clutch/There’s a hand with claws/You treat with dirty gauze/He gropes for your fingers when you reach inside”) now “Squeezing produce at the market with your feeble hands/You eye the scrapes and bruises/While your baby schmoozes/You’re spent and sold, your skin’s inside your bones …Scraping on by the will of your pawns”, once again building to a bare-knuckle pay-off punch “Your love for him is worse than capital punishment/He’s slipping through the tipsy congregations/And you’re stuck to the walls”.

The album ends with the rolling rhythm, keys and dampened drums of Flood and a final enigmatic and raw set of lyrics (“He thinks I look like my mother/I’ve been spitting up blood”) as she asks, “Is it really the bush that’s being beat?” and closes with “You’re peeling off my plastic patches/And I can taste the flood”. While it could perhaps have used a little more variation in the pacing, her words, music, and voice elevate this far beyond the realms of the ordinary; she may well be the next Courtney Marie Andrews.