pepi ginsberg: yes city EP

Having braved a huge stylistic leap on last year’s jittery, experimental East Is East, her first album arranged, recorded and produced with a full band, Pepi Ginsberg returns to a more single-minded agenda with her newest EP. Sharing its name with her (infrequently updated) blog, Yes City comprises six songs penned by Ginsberg in the time between writing for East Is East and completing work on its predecessor, 2008′s Red, and, accordingly, sounds only fleetingly like either.

Despite a larger cast of players, Yes City makes for a more subdued listen than Ginsberg’s recent rollicking productions, the pace dictated by her more straightforward melodies. The result is a consistently mid-paced collection that’s coated with a varnish of moody authenticity but nothing here wallops it right out of the park with Ginsberg’s trademark inventiveness. That’s not to undersell the careful thought that’s been poured into these songs; not a note sounds out of place, and while the arrangements may be less attention grabbing this time around, they are certainly still rich. Whereas Ginsberg restricted herself on Red and East Is East to singing and playing guitar, here she adds keyboards, horns and violin to her contributions and each makes its presence felt across the EP.

Producer Bill Moriarty is famed for his attentiveness to vocal recording, discouraging artists from multi-tracking or swathing their voices in reverb, and here he ensures that Ginsberg’s distinct, arresting singing remains direct, unadorned and the focal point of every track. Even when competing with rhapsodic Hammond organ sounds on the fervid ‘Only Love’, or when ‘Another Time Of Day’ bursts into brass-led euphoria, Ginsberg is never swamped, never over-reaches. The track that lingers longest in the mind, though, is Yes City‘s sparsest. ‘Tornado’ consists of little more than a soft, insistent drum beat and barely-there acoustic guitar, but the slightly off-kilter, hushed dual vocals of Ginsberg and an androgynous other give the song a disconcerting, hair-raising feel at odds with everything else here. It’s a striking moment in a solid EP, and one that proves that Ginsberg doesn’t always need to rewrite the book to make a deep impact.

[Doubling Cube/Iris; January 24, 2011]

Written by: Alan Pedder

Tags: east is east, pepi ginsberg, yes city EP

This entry was posted on Friday, January 21st, 2011 at 9:22 am and is filed under albums & EPs, reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.