Emmaleen Tangleweed’s songs creep up on you like a spectre from the deepest parts of the night. First coming to attention via Cruel Nature Records’ re-issues of her first two albums, The Sun will Still Shine when you Die and Songs from the Unseen, the Unsaid and the Unborn last year, the Western Cape, South Africa based songwriter spins the kind of yarns that leave permanent marks.
Tangleweed’s vivid tales, through the campfire flames, and delivered with a deep, honey-layered inflection, her songs shine like jewels from a crown. Parts gothic, noirish and doom-laden, Tangleweed’s songs evoke the imagery of the most rugged terrains that lead to civilisation’s backwaters.
It’s those same backwaters that Tangleweed illuminates, enticing the listener to inhabit them, and not just through her songs. These adventures remain on her new album, The Weaving, and ahead its release on July 31 (again via Cruel Nature), exclusive to Sun 13, you can watch / listen to the the song, Strangeling Angel, below.
Strangeling Angel underlines Tangleweed’s love for storytelling. Sonically, it’s a rambling blues number that forms the bridge between Songs from the Unseen, the Unsaid and the Unborn and much of The Weaving. Strangeling Angel, arguably the outlier of the bunch.
Emmaleen Tangleweed Interview: “I make a lot of stuff up, I’ll cry over an imaginary story”
There are many telling vignettes on The Weaving. Perhaps none better than Tangleweed declaration on the doom blues of Ask The Dust (“The burnt-out rust of the golden age / Dawn is here”). In the same song, she probes with the simple question: “Is there anyone out there?”
It’s a sharp ask given the context in which it could be construed. Last year, Tangleweed declared that she would no longer play live in her immediate surroundings, and this passage could feed into a greater struggle. One where it’s hard to fathom why her music isn’t reaching more ears, because to these ones, with an aesthetic so singular and haunting as Tangleweed’s, there aren’t many better in the current blues sphere.
Tracking back, and The Weaving begins with The Hours. Steeped in Southern Gothic sentiment, Tangleweed’s story is like prose akin to passages from Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Verse after verse, raining punches before the heaviest blow of all (“Smothering everyone in my wake / The survivor’s guilt is more than I can take”). Language Of The Hands follows down similar, unlit paths. The protagonist, barely able to claw their way back from the doldrums. (“Straight jacket of silk lace and thorns shivering before you / Falling into the world, the starless sea.”)
The themes don’t get any lighter. The slow crawl of Never Ending History, a searing indictment on colonialism (“There’s only one truth / There’s only one God…. All around the sea / People become what they believe”). Coupled with a bedding of sound reminiscent of Tom Waits’ Mule Variations, it’s one of the best songs Tangleweed has written.
Inspired by today’s attention economy, Lovelorn sees Tangelweed reserving some scorn for these times, too (“Looking bad in other’s eyes is now a crime”). It’s why her songs resonate so much. Effortlessly unpicking the superficialities of a modern-day existence, Tangelweed cuts through the bullshit, transcending above so many things. When songs sat with you for weeks on end instead of passing in a flash.
Which is exactly what Tangleweed accomplishes with 3 O’Clock. A song anyone would dream to write, this wistful lament bores all the way to the marrow. The protagonist, sharing a broken tale of an estranged relationship with their father. Sonically, Tangleweed matches the emotional intensity with something that fully encompasses The Weaving. An album that focuses on life’s dark moments that demand to be lived.
The solitude in Tangleweed’s work, so cracked and broken that you can almost feel the weight before the music itself. Aesthetically, it’s blues, but with the conviction in which Tangleweed delivers these songs, make no mistake, this is soul, and it comes from the deepest parts of it.
The Weaving is out July 31 via Cruel Nature Records. Purchase from Bandcamp.
