Emily Robb

Philly guitarist Emily Robb peeled back a few layers of the psyche on her last solo outing, How To Moonwalk, and she follows it up with an equally affecting, yet more sculpted vision of her amp-fried soul singe. As I’ve mentioned before, the record that comes readily to mind when listening to If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection is Tetuzi Akiyama’s excellent broken brain opus Don’t Forget To Boogie. While Robb isn’t wrestling with the physical limitations of her equipment as Akiyama was on that altar to rock’s fractured soul, she’s locked into the same inner explorations of the depths of riff and repetition. Like Boogie, the songs here parachute the listener into the heart of the havoc, with each new cut coming on like the overloaded heart of a dying sun that could have served as the center of some longer improvisation. Without the build up or burn down, the songs slam into the listener like a side-impact collision, knocking us senseless and left dazed and ringing.

It’s a great approach, and one that’s distinguished Robb from some of her fellow guitar improv peers. The brevity and brutality of the record doesn’t allow for lingering in lamentations. There’s no sense dragging the masses to the mountain when you can drop them onto the jagged peaks from 10,000 feet. Emily’s fractured phrases twist the listener around the ragged chassis of rock. Sometimes its just a coal-hot blast of noise, but quite often she slides into the hypnotic core of boogie and the scalds and scrapes the record leaves behind feel all the more worthwhile. If you’ve been missing out on one of Philly’s best kept secrets, find a bit of time to a tussle with the molten rumble of If I Am Misery Then Give Me Affection.

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