About | Advertise | Work For Us | RSS Saturday, July 31, 2010

Emma Wallace

This event has already occurred.

Emma Wallace (acoustic)

Critic's Pick

Orlando acoustic-jazz vocalist Emma Wallace has quite a sucker punch. She is equally perceptive and enthralling in the multiple genres she skips across on her album, A Reason to Stay Up All Night (available on iTunes). A Reason features the socially conscious redhead as a Tin Pan Alley plugger, a vaudevillian tease and a smoky Blue Note seductress. Wallace uses her exceptional storytelling ability as the setup for heart-wrenching couplets designed to disarm. For every amorous metaphor (“You’re like the first time Bonnie and Clyde held up a bank”), there lies a buried, yet personally revealing sting (“I’m ready to be the girl you take for granted”). Wallace extols the benefits of loving a hippie (“Baby, you’re more enlightened than most men can attain”) on “Part of Your Mudra,” but gently emasculates the same partner frightfully efficiently (“But in bed I don’t want a Buddha, I want a Genghis Khan”). From the lyrics to her joyfully unpredictable chord changes, Wallace keeps you on your toes, which seems to be just where she wants you – all the better to “saute your heart.” (Staff)