Loss is inevitable and superfluous. Everyone will lose someone, and everyone's loss will be felt by another. Dismal as this unavoidable destiny is for ourselves and those we love and leave behind, it is only one phase of a cycle, one that brought us into this world, and one that will indubitably lead us out. As it is so certain, is it to be feared? Or is death to be celebrated?* The Irish seem to think so. Their wakes are as festive as New Year's Day (it's apparently their weddings that they observe with undemonstrative regard), while slightly further south, Ghanaians see the dearly departed off in elaborate, hand-carved coffins, shaped to signify the dreams, achievements, and soul of those they bear like a flashy jewelry box for their freshly discarded wares, and across the ocean, Mexicans welcome their ancestors back each year, as shadows grow longer and the air chills, guided back by candlelight to receive the renewed blessings of their still-breathing kin. Emily Cross knows a little something about the gaps, gauges, and gestalt of life and death's gamut, working as a death doula when she is not memorializing her moods and observations of the obscure through her recording project Cross Record- a shifting ambient variety of warm chamber pop that is both subtly haunting and pleasing to the ear, similar to Low's Double Negative or Broadcast's The Noise Made by People. Crush Me is her sixth LP, first since relocating to Cornwall in the UK, and proceeds with a quiet ache of susurrus florescence pervading the spellbinding itch and prickle existential reflection and calm, a hushed and grassy weave of fertile insight and lucidly tenebrous quotations that run from Emily's tongue to your ear like an excess of ink streaming down loose parchment to pool in a basin, smelling of dusky perfumes and ground, exotic flowers as it flows. Conversations with the departed over late-night coffee and cigarettes, notations on the living as if arranging an anthology collection, jarred emotions set free like a cloud of fireflies swarming to mingle in the camouflage of twilight and the shadows of the Milky Way. Crushed, packed, steeped, and sipped as if it were warm liquid-light and the dew of dissipating fog, Crush Me is cast in living observance of all those things that are too vast to hold, undeterred by the enormity of being and unbeing alike, it is a jubilee that sways the human nidus as it persists in naive ecstasy, suspended in a strange dignity above the gracious depths of the infinite.
Incoherent Italian Babble (Ba Da Bing) Records.