Emily Merrell, Masks Review

Emily Merrell honed her skills and graduated with a Master of Music in Jazz Performance from the University of North Texas. Currently residing in Lehi Utah near Salt Lake City, Merrell is a busy entrepreneur as well as a bustling performer. She owns and operates EM Vocal Studio in Lehi, UT, and produces an original podcast, “Artifice,” interviewing professional artists and what she calls the life of an “artpreneur”. Here full-length album Masks goes beyond the music and invokes a mixed media experience of what she describes as “exploration of disguise and disclosure.” The album features work from over 35 professional artists. A project two years in the making. Merrell created a specific mask them for every song on the album.

Positives: Smart production, with a sunny voice that highlights shimmer songs and inventive soundscapes.

Bottom Line: Merrell has created a uniquely inventive album that cannot be compared to other artists, as she clearly is in her own realm of creative liberation. Each song is its own journey of beautiful colorizations and textural explorations. Her writing is smart and evocative. Her aesthetic is cinematic and fuses the foundation of pop with the complexity of jazz, clearly influenced by her diverse influences. Each tune is surprising and not typical. She explores different feels, and structures never taking the listener on a typical journey. That is not to say the tunes are not catchy, as each is memorable, but each offers a maturity and depth that is fashioned in a highly listenable album of empiricism. That’s the short of it!