Emma Pollock - Begging The Night To Take Hold

“I didn’t know the trouble I was causing, didn’t know that I could do that.” The opening line of ‘Prize Hunter’, the lead song and single from Emma Pollock’s first album in nine years, is sung over a sprightly bassline that belies a rich compendium that is the songwriter’s most personal and expressive collection to date.

Recorded over five years against a backdrop of personal tumult, family grief and self-revelations, ‘Begging The Night To Take Hold’ documents hardships but also points to glints of light in the darkness. Recorded during and immediately after the Pandemic at Chemikal Underground’s Chem19, ‘Begging The Night To Take Hold’ takes the artist’s musical imagination and develops it into a baroque landscape, an invocation of physical and psychic place.

With longterm collaborator Paul Savage in the producer and drummer’s chair, Pollock fleshed out her songs with instrumentation by Pete Harvey (cello, Modern Studies) and Graeme Smillie (piano and bass). The ideas and tonal shifts cascade in linear fashion, flowing in a technicolour deep and evocative. It’s a richness that Pollock has always played with, both solo and in The Delgados, but here it’s given an enhanced poignancy that only a period of upheaval can instigate.