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Ember Schrag plays folk music that is unmistakingly of its time, that is by turns wholly representative of the output of any female singer-songwriter who has dipped her toe in the mainstream in the last decade but that also betrays a soul rooted in Nebraska. Songs are well-crafted and charm the listener with their simplicity and clarity, the latter courtesy of quality production and the former to a style of arrangement that is both unfussy and creative, incorporating some fine musicianship throughout (with Gunter Voelker’s acoustic lead breaks particularly worthy of note) and the occasional addition of an instrumental passage that adds much to the song without ever outstaying its welcome, as is the case with the west-coast style harmonic climax to ‘Iowa’. A bluesy tone rings throughout with a well-balanced combination of moods, never annoyingly spritely and with a healthily light sprinkling of melancholy.
So, ‘A Cruel, Cruel Woman’ is a collection of songs that are contemporary enough to appeal to the mass market and could sit happily alongside those of any of todays more established acts, but, and this is key, there is a timelessness sewn into their fabric that proves they will endure. That the album is so neatly bookended by the contrasting styles of opening track ‘Cupid’s Bloom’, an upbeat pop/ folk crossover showcasing Schrags unaffected singing style that immediately begs for comparison with KT Tunstall and Amy McDonald, and ‘Cruel Woman Blues’, a classic example of dive bar Americana that is in fact an original composition but that could just as easily have been dragged kicking and screaming from vaults untouched for fifty years, is reason-in-chief that this talent won’t, we hesitate to say, become a dying ember any time soon.
RICHARD STOKOE
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