Edwige: ‘Rise And Sing’
Having made her initial mark with a couple of quirky, tricky-to-pigeonhole folk-pop albums, Edwige has made one on which she intends to celebrate “God’s beautiful gift of singing.” This could mean a lot of things. Perhaps she’s taking that unorthodox, archly beautiful voice of hers on an exploration of experimental a-capella songs, or a pure set of vocal rounds. Perhaps she’s made an album of devotional folk; or an unexpected gospel record.
As it happens, none of these are exactly the case. Edwige’s embrace of the joy of singing may be heartfelt, but it’s also comfortable. The key tone of ‘Rise and Sing’ is relaxation, and of Edwige’s assurance in her own work and her own methods. In many respects, it remains a familiar Edwige album. Many familiar tastes certainly remain intact. She still favours upfront lyrical messages, and continues to steer a course placing her somewhere between cabaret entertainer (especially on the oompah-pop of Bad Hair Day) and announcing angel.
She’s also continuing to develop her tendencies towards baroque pop arrangements. I Just Can’t Resist That Love is given lift by a suspended chorus of trilling voices and sunny passages of oboe; Into View is threaded with reeds, harpsichord, and tuba; while a harp adds sparkle to the simple, open love song After The Rain. The perky swing of New Mexico – with its elasticated guitars and psychedelic pedal-steel keyboards in tow – shows another side of her tastes, this time a dash of country music for the road.
The most surprising aspect of ‘Rise And Sing’ is a new affection for noisy guitar pop. Edwige’s latest producer (former Homer/Robyn Hitchcock sideman Andrew Claridge) sploshes some crashing electric guitars around several songs here, beefing up the acoustic strumming with touches of indie-pop, swamp-rock and grunge. The unplugged directness of previous Edwige albums, with their ornate bursts of cuteness and their denser musical surprises, sounded as if they’d come from odd-shaped rooms in an apartment piled high with spiritual books and knick-knacks. This album suggests that Edwige has recently knocked through a wall or two, and built a nice scruffy garage to play in. Her voice, as ever, is peppered with odd pitch-swoops, vibrato and declamatory theatrical inflections, and is still French-accented even after years of living in London. It’s an odd match for this bristly rock clanging – yet she thrives on the cruder energy that the extra noise provides.
With her perpetual good humour intact, Edwige uses the extra force to help her to drive home a few righteous stilettos. Straddling a catchy swaggering hook on Ears On Fire, she takes dry pot-shots at questionable cults with unreliable gurus – “I heard he was unfaithful to his wife, / I promptly took his words, and boiled them with my rice.” On Elegy For You, she skewers another bad-news, would-be Mephistopheles, decorating her lines with layered falsetto shimmers of vocalese while using the main lyric to sketch his cunning in song – “You’re so good at enchanting – / you lure with hopes and dreams / held through your spindly fingers, / and have them crushed like a crumply paper ball.” She also draws on this energy on Time For The Glorious: switching between midvoice and falsetto, rising serenely over the fuzzy rock backing to declaim “the leaf wouldn’t be but for the tree, / the wave wouldn’t roll but for the sea, / your heart wouldn’t be / but for a love much greater than one can ever conceive.”
Ah, yes. There are God-songs on ‘Rise and Sing’. Previously Edwige has only alluded to her personal, devotional brand of Christianity through cryptic clues, but now she’s beginning to become more direct. While she’s not yet citing chapter and verse, or names, the sacred aspect is clearer now, and this in turn reveals the true nature of many of her previous songs. As for the new ones, I Just Can’t Resist That Love pulls off the old soul-music trick of blurring across the boundaries of love song and devotional hymn. Opting for generosity rather than hectoring, Edwige’s revealed evangelism takes a variety of forms over a broad range of experience and musical method.
We get our gospel song after all – I May Have, in which Edwige testifies doubts and faith over a soft bed of electric chapel organ and little electric guitar agreements. Behind the pretty arrangement, Into View reveals itself as a waltzing tale of a Damascene conversion. For the jazz-tinged acoustica of Tea Light Sympathy Edwige turns teacher, with a gentle (but stern) offer to share her path. On Fusion, she becomes an ecstatic celebrant, kicking off a startling, delirious cocktail of techno pulse, hard-rocking fuzzpunk and hoedown. Choppy cello and guitars meet up with a stomping dance-floor beat and speaker-trashing bassline, and are in turn covered in festoons of Edwige as she chants, lets rip again with the vocalese and sends up fireworks of singing.
The thing about devotion, though, is that it involves letting go. Edwige is such a determined performer – so enthralled with the message, the observations, the little dialogues of life – that little of this (bar the rampaging delight of Fusion) rips through into the ecstatic. The message is always already decided, never discovered, and so the sense of actual revelation is lost. That’s a shame – for believer and unbeliever alike, observing or sharing a revelation of faith is often a fuse for crucial sympathy, and on her songs Edwige seems to miss out on this transformatory moment.
There’s one significant exception, in which Edwige’s wayward journey takes her up into a place she’s never visited before in song. Do I is that music-of-the-moment that’s missing elsewhere. An unexpected (and welcome) bit of psychedelic noise-folk, it’s set on Nico organ drones and on a cloudy screech of guitars so overdriven that they sound like English brass bands scattered by gales. The lyric is the simplest of declarations – no angles, no patter, just a naked, assured statement of devotion. “Do I come? – I do. / Will I follow? – I will. / In the light or darkness, pray for strength, / ah my love, … / Give me the warmth of your love. / Safe with you forever, ever, ever, ever.” Stepping up from the chapel drone, rising above this massing, crashing confusion of tangled feedback, Edwige is making her leap of faith for us; all cabaret cuteness falling away.
It’s the kind of inspiring moment which that unearthly voice was made for. I wish she’d do more like this.
Edwige: ‘Keep The Change’
Quasar Music, EDW3CD
CD album
Released: 2004
Buy it from:
Quasar Music or CD Baby.
Edwige online:
Misfit City 
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