Margaret Glaspy’s first album is a fabulous miniature, clocking in at just 34 minutes, that gets better every time you listen to it. It’s clearly a singer-songwriter record in that it’s the thoughts of one person, no matter how personal – the third track, You and I, opens with the stark declaration “Tonight I’m a little too turned on to talk about us / Tomorrow I’ll be too turned off and won’t give a fuck” – but it’s also a rock’n’roll record. It’s not maximalist: there’s plenty of space between the drums, bass, guitars and Glaspy’s voice, which is sometimes resigned, sometimes yearning. The key relationship in Emotions and Math isn’t that between Glaspy and her characters, but between her voice and guitar – the guitar has a rough, unpolished sound, not amateurish, but unvarnished, with hints of Crazy Horse, offsetting her voice. She knows when to let that voice stretch out, too, and how to maximise the drama: see the way she turns cold and angry on Memory Lane, telling her lover “to go back to wherever the fuck you came”, just before a thrillingly approximate guitar solo kicks in.
