Emmaleen Tangleweed‘s music is more accurately described as a channelling than a song. Summoning stories of lost souls too tortured to let go, she cries and yearns as they no longer can, and yet, a silver thread of faith binds them. Themes of death, relationship and lingering hope imbue the listener with an eerie feeling of communion, of conversing with souls who have crossed the great divide.
Painting a visionary picture for the listener the stories contain hidden characters and everyday dramas played out in a time capsule of song giving the words weight in the earthly as much as in the ethereal they are delicately plucked from.
Born in Swakopmund, Namibia, Emmaleen began playing guitar and writing songs early in life releasing a slew of haunting singles and EPs, yet the true testament to the culmination of a life dedicated to her craft can be found in her two full length albums: Songs From The Unseen, the Unsaid and the Unborn (2022) and The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die (2023) are gothic masterpieces of story telling and true artistry that showcase perfectly her talent as a multi-instrumentalist and for the first time have been packaged together as a double-album by Cruel Nature Records
From banjo to Spanish nylon, from steel resonator to electric guitar Emmaleen seamlessly serenades with a mastery over her instruments, always careful to serve the song and its higher calling. However her true power lies in her stout voice. At times delicate and oftentimes commanding, the harrowing boom of her heart’s song in full force is as entrancing as it is fearsome.
Emmaleen’s sound touches here and there on the mystic brooding of the Mississippi Delta, an insinuation of existential blues here, a nod to the providence of gospel there, and yet at no point is it any of these so called genres. Emmaleen Tangleweed is a world unto herself, a microcosm of the astral that she is but a conduit to.
Songs From The Unseen, the Unsaid and the Unborn and The Sun Will Still Shine When You Die will be released as a double album on a specially extended cassette on February 21 2025 via Cruel Nature Records. It can pre-ordered and downloaded here on Bandcamp.
