It doesn’t take a genius to figure out why Nina Persson is so enamoured of Emm Gryner’s lovelorn airs. The Ontario singer-songwriter’s exasperated delivery could’ve provided the template for the Cardigans’ tired and emotional masterpiece Long Gone Before Daylight.
On the face of it Gryner’s no blinding original. Her timbre and tone (and, it must be said, the album’s title) aren’t a million miles away from the Lilith Fair class of ’95. But the angels really are in the details. Sarah McLachlan or Paula Cole or even Fiona Apple would never tolerate some of the intentionally rough-hewn sounds sanctioned by Gryner’s own production job. The way drummer Charles Dumont leaves the hi-hat halfway open on devastated (and devastating) songs like ‘Empty Holes’. The intentionally sour piano chord on ‘Killing Spree’. The way you can almost visualise Gryner’s elbow pumping as she strums the acoustic figure on ‘Match’. For all the songbird fragility, she has a robust way with a song that a more tentative or ‘tasteful’ performer would treat with kid gloves. She may write like a girl who spent her teenagedom huddled in a sweater replaying Joni in her bedroom, but she plays like a gutted rock chick that received a piano and acoustic combo rather than telecaster and amp for her sweet 16. Tunes like ‘Let It Snow, Young As The Night’ and ‘Die Evergreen’ sound as paradoxically bummed out and uplifting as anything by A Girl Called Eddy or Gemma Hayes circa Night On My Side.
Goddess is a pretty smitten and sublime record.

Key Track: ‘Die Evergreen’