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EMMA POLLOCK

Begging The Night To Take Hold

Glasgow indie-rock mainstay unearths interior and exterior truths.

By Lisa-Marie Ferla

Emma Pollock: no easy answers

CHEMIKAL UNDERGROUND

9/10

STEPHANIE GIBSON

HOW to explain the nine years that have passed since In Search Of Harperfield, the self-acknowledged “best received” album in Emma Pollock’s 30 years at the vanguard of the Scottish underground? In her own words: “Start at the beginning until you sing sunlight”. This oblique, poetic fragment encapsulates a tumultuous journey of self-discovery, captured in all its light and shade on the songwriter’s fourth solo album.

Recorded in safe spaces during and after pandemic lockdowns, Begging The Night To Take Hold was shelved while The Delgados – the band formed by Pollock and three friends in ’90s Glasgow, who, through their Chemikal Underground label and studio, continue to underpin much of the city’s music scene – embarked on a triumphant reunion tour, including sets at Primavera in Barcelona and their hometown’s open-air Kelvingrove Bandstand. As she returned to the record, and her grief at her father’s sudden death that informed much of its writing, Pollock obtained a post-menopause autism diagnosis – and started finding answers to the questions she’d been asking herself about her place in the world.

Opener “Prize Hunter” captures this journey towards self-awareness acutely. Although written and recorded, like the rest of the album, pre-diagnosis, in hindsight it resonates like Pollock’s conversation with her interior voice. “All the words and numbers you could want”, she sings over a see-sawing bass riff, searching for patterns in an attempt to make sense of the world around her, “but I sometimes wonder if they endanger my health”. As the song warms up, the static of the bass is replaced by rich, sonorous cello, a compositionally perfect rendering of the quest towards deeper meaning.

Indeed, Pollock is in motion on much of this record: drilling down into her psyche; pacing through moments of psychological distress; seeking comfort in the familiar surroundings of her childhood stomping grounds in southern Scotland; layering the Marchtown of Mary, Queen of Scots with the modern-day Strathbungo on Glasgow’s southside, where she now lives. In the midst of the conflict with a loved one that informs the elegant, tormented “Rapid Rush Of Red”, she names this pattern, her recognition the first step to seeking compromise and resolution: “Is it possible to train a sprinter to slow down, or a dancer to stay standing when the music comes around?” she ponders, over a lush musical backdrop that is part chamber orchestra, part Scott Walker. The music swells to a crescendo, resisting an easy conclusion: “I wish to find another colour and paint with that instead”.