Hello Emerson - How to Cook Everything (2020)

The debut album “Above The Floorboards” released a year and a half ago and discussed at Sounds & Books was a little stroke of genius by Hello Emerson. The indie folk band from Columbus, Ohio, which essentially consists of singer and songwriter Sam Bodary as well as Jack Doran (keyboard instruments) and Daniel Seibert (percussion), is now returning with "How To Cook Everything" - named after the cookbook of the same name by Mark Bittman. Similar to the debut, the second work is quite lavish, but never arranged overloaded. In addition to the usual instruments guitar, bass, drums, Hello Emerson piano, pedal steel, mandolin, strings, saxophones, clarinets, trumpets, trombones and a 30-part choir can be heard.

Despite suspicion of opulence, the songs are still much more attached to the lo-fi sound. The comparisons with Conor Colonel or Ryan Adams are still justified, Sam Bodary could hardly wish for better references. With "How To Cook Everything" he once again succeeds in a varied and multi-layered Americana indie folk rock album, which has a hymnic-pathetic ending in "Seat 16B". Bodary has a degree in literature, his texts are short prose works, and in "Seat 16B," the 25-year-old songwriter tells the story of a middle-aged woman who leaves Arkansas for the first time and leaves her two almost-grown sons behind for a relationship to revive with her childhood sweetheart. As if to cheer you up, a polyphonic choir smashes the line "There's a first time for everything". In the most solemn moments of this piece, The Head And The Heart are not far away.