AEM087 Emanuel and the Fear

Some­times you encounter music so eclec­tic, so diverse and brim­ming with influ­ences that you know it must either be the work of one per­son or eleven.  When the musi­cal diver­sity is at its high­est, I think per­haps the one-person unit is the one with the lower degree of difficulty—humans are ani­mals, and with the nat­ural infight­ing, egos, what­ever, you fig­ure, “This must just be one dude in his basement.”

That was my first thought when I heard the enig­mat­i­cally diverse yet imme­di­ately acces­si­ble Emanuel and the Fear.  Dur­ing the first two songs I heard, I wrote down a list of no fewer than 30 bands who I heard shades of, includ­ing Zep­plin, Mars Volta, Decem­brists, Suf­jan, Nine Inch Nails, Rage Against the Machine, Bjork, Muse…what on earth?  The list goes on.  The influ­ences list on their myspace would be a joke except you read every one of those artists and nod, “yep,” to yourself.

Well, on the, “who is mak­ing this great­ness?” front, turns out it’s kinda a bit of both the one and eleven per­son options.  Up front, a clear vocal and song-writing pres­ence is Emanuel Ayvas (lead vocals, gui­tar, piano)—a born pop-singer and song­writer, it seems, who takes great com­mand of each track.  But he’s no dude in a basement—he’s backed by The Fear, ten fear­less musi­cians of impres­sive prowess: Gil Goldin (bass), Jeff Gretz (drums), Tom Swaf­ford (vio­lin), Dallin Apple­baum (synth, vocals), Liz Han­ley (vio­lin, vocals), Dan Tirer (gui­tar), David Nel­son (trom­bone), Nic Cowles (flute), Brian Sanders (cello), Chris Coletti (trum­pet). Eleven equally daz­zling and clas­si­cally trained musicians.

There’s a con­so­nance in that list of, “sounds-like,” artists men­tioned above, though, in that for those artists, their pop sen­si­bil­i­ties are front and cen­ter of their exper­i­men­ta­tion (weaker Mars Volta aside…), prompt­ing my sec­ond men­tal ques­tion: “I can’t believe these guys aren’t famous yet…”

One lis­ten to Emanuel and the Fear and I sus­pect you will think the same thing.  Hear­ing them reminded me of the first time I heard Mika, and thought, “oh yes, this will catch on in about an hour.” And that’s no sleight either.  This impres­sion of immi­nent suc­cess isn’t due, as it might usu­ally be, to pop-culture pan­der­ing, lazy-but-fun beats, or any use of auto-tune (thank god).  Rather, Emanuel gives this impres­sion because it’s just that good, and just that accessible.

Emanuel and the Fear are the first good band to come out of some place called Brook­lyn, New York.  Okay, that’s not true, but let’s not fault them for loca­tional uno­rig­i­nal­ity.  Despite their advanced sound, they’re rel­a­tively new to this game.  Lis­ten is their first full length, released just last month through Paper Gar­den Records, and already earn­ing them rave reviews from most peo­ple with ear holes.  This band isn’t afraid to gig, either.  How on earth they all fit on stage is beyond me, but they’re doing just that around Europe as we write/read.

I chal­lenge you to not like “Dear Friend.” Go on.  Just try.  Okay, don’t try too hard, because it’s going to be much more enjoy­able to like it.  “Dear Friend,” is, at its core, a clas­sic Amer­i­can pop song with a bit of flour­ish in the form of strings and elec­tron­ics.  What sets it apart is how well exe­cuted the flour­ishes are, and how flaw­less the pop is done.  The track starts with two high energy hits leav­ing the piano under­neath, joined by vocals that give way to the choral build-up of strings and brass.  Truly great pop artists are able to milk much sat­is­fac­tion out of even the small­est moments, and this track is full of them, like the held notes of, “and then much to my sur­prise…” or the trum­pet work or trom­bone solo, or, dear lord, how much do I love the lit­tle Muse-esque break­away in the mid­dle of this track?  A lot, that’s how much.

And some­how this pecu­liar mid-track-electro-float-to-cloud-9 allows this sim­ple song to return with some snap­ping, a one note organ riff, and a whole lot more grav­ity.  Already “Dear Friend” has earned its keep and it’s not even half over, with many majorly epic and sweep­ing grand pop moments to come.  The rest is a pretty text­book intro to choral swells and post-verse builds that, with addi­tions of back­ing vocals and some real live strings (Thank god!  I love you, key­boards, but you weren’t built to sim­u­late strings) that retain full tone and there­fore keep the power of the har­monies.  Do do do do do do doooo…some­thing I never thought I’d say.  And then, of course, clos­ing on the same two hits, like a gym­nast nail­ing the landing.

Watch­ing B-side “Guatemala,” played live really cements a sub­tle Rage Against the Machine ele­ment to the reper­toire.  Par­tially because of the Morello-esque riff­ing, par­tially because of the polit­i­cal fire Ayvas spits here, and prob­a­bly mostly because of the Zach de la Rocha hairdo.  Though this is one of the few times on Lis­ten that the energy and vit­riol reaches this level, Emanuel and the Fear pull it off quite effort­lessly, and with some very diverse flour­ishes.  Once again the string and wood­wind sec­tion com­ple­ment the meaty pop extremely well, and some par­tic­u­larly punchy elec­tronic drum hits are blended in expertly to give a nice elec­tronic cusp to an oth­er­wise fully sym­phonic pow­er­house song.

I like this track as a B-side because I think it really shows off Emanuel and the Fear’s range, both son­i­cally in the many gen­res of music weaved into the work, and also emo­tion­ally, par­tic­u­larly in con­trast to the jaunty “Dear Friend.” “Guatemala” has got a hell of a bite to it, and The Fear cre­ate a lot of that ten­sion by play­ing off the stan­dard rock and roll drum-bass-guitar. From the chaotic flute barely per­cep­ti­ble at the begin­ning of the track, to the swelling strings trad­ing off moments with the vocals.

The album def­i­nitely takes quite a lot of emo­tional and tonal turns.  Less well exe­cuted, and Emanuel and the Fear might be labeled, “chaotic…disorganized…blah blah blah.”  Ulti­mately, you’re not really going to hear those things because Emanuel and the Fear suc­ceed.  They suc­ceed because their music is earnest—uncomplicated in its com­plex­ity.  Peo­ple tend to worry more about dis­or­ga­ni­za­tion when the music isn’t good and they’re grasp­ing for rea­sons why (read: I’m sus­pi­cious of this as a rea­son for a music’s fail­ure).  For­tu­nately, the great thing about music as an immer­sive art form is that we can for­get about all that for a while, the crit­i­cal us.  So when you’re done read­ing this increas­ingly ironic appraisal, my final rec­om­men­da­tion is to enjoy the hell out of these songs.

Rick Andrews

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