Graham Reid | | <1 min read
Emma Paki: Century Sky (acoustic version)
It has been an astonishing decade and a half (and a bit) since Emma Paki's remarkable System Virtue, Greenstone and her debut album Oxygen of Love.
And since then mostly silence on the recording front.
And she's in no hurry to rush back, this EP is just three songs in acoustic versions (two produced by Bic Runga), then mixed and remixed by various people (including Bryson Campbell of Dam Native and Mahuia Bridgeman-Cooper, who produced that excellent Maisey Rika album Tohu).
But if that sounds like slim pickings then think again: these three songs are exceptionally beautiful, powerful and typically oblique.
Century Sky is a seductive and mysterious song (made more so in the jazzy remix by Tony Strong which brings in sensual sax); Stand Alone is a song of self-assertion (with added punch in Strongman's mix) and Solid Love is strong ballad (beautiful in the acoustic version with a hypnotically weaving vocal line, losing it emotional impact in the mixed version) of great hurt: "Why don't you stop seeing her? What don't you see in me?"
Paki was alway an . . . interesting, shall we say? -- character but the songs here, show she still possesses a magical voice and can write a song of intuitively integrated melody and lyric which by-pass the brain and go straight to the heart. Exceptional.
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