Emporium: “Gloomy Shadows” – you can feel a heart beating under the music

Hailing from Scotland’s capital Edinburgh, Emporium formed in the winter of 1998. Currently London-based, composer and producer Ewan McKenzie is finalizing a new Emporium recording and working towards some live dates with a full band. In the meantime Emporium has released the single, “Gloomy Shadows”. It’s the aural equivalent of napping on the beach close to the water, as it cycles among feelings of baking in the sun, to the gentle lapping of water against your toes, to the soft crashing of waves washing over. And back out again.

There’s nothing objectionable about this music, which means that Emporium will appeal to just about everyone’s tastes. The soft, delicate vocals and cautious, sometimes guarded instrumentation will cozily warm the listener. And the hooks are there, and they’re powerful enough to grab hold and not let go. The track has good pop sensibility, and the lyrics are quite sharp, witty, and refreshing even when they lean towards being inscrutable.

On “Gloomy Shadows”, one feels almost that the singer is singing for himself and maybe a few friends. This personal feel gives a depth to the music because it brings the song down to your heart level, rather than to mass culture’s pocketbook. You know the band probably is not in this business only for the money, therefore you can feel a heart beating under the music that you won’t feel in most, if not all, commercial pop.

Drawing heavily from the 60s, initially, the song may feel too simple, too primitive for those who have a penchant for today’s intensely over produced song structures, where melody is drowned into layers of sonic effects. Then hours after a listen to “Gloomy Shadows” that you may have hardly paid attention too, you will find yourself humming the incredibly addictive melody.

A song that gains strength and leans on its verses and choruses to build an astonishingly impressive structure, as simply framed as a dome, and as difficult to knock down, is hard to come by in modern-day music. Emporium is a must for anyone who feels that most other popular musicians have taken a wrong course down the existential interstate.

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