EMILY HAINES AND THE SOFT SKELETON
Knives Don’t Have Your Back
Last Gang
· The morning after you danced the night away.
I first listened to this album on a cold, wet Thursday morning – and I think that might have been the perfect time for it. While Emily Haines’s work with indie-dance-rockers Metric is geared towards energetic Saturday nights, her first solo release is like the strangely comforting letdown after a raucous night at the club. And while the thoroughgoing gentleness can be overwhelming, it leaves a resonant afterglow when taken in measured doses.
Haines’s voice and delivery here is like a muted trumpet – the same distinctive tone is there, but the quality is strikingly different. Her vocals are backed sometimes by horns (most beautifully on "Reading in Bed"), sometimes by strings, sometimes by rock instrumentation and sometimes by all of them, as in "The Lottery." The heart of Knives Don’t Have Your Back, though, is Haines and a piano, spinning melancholy and simple lushness with lyrics like "rather give the world away than wake up lonely" and "that’s why I tried so hard to save you but it can’t be done."
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