You Still Don’t Know About Love

Speedy Ortiz “Emma O”

It’s a little strange to me that Speedy Ortiz would choose to put “Emma O,” a major step forward in their evolution as a band, as a song on a stopgap EP connected to their previous album along with a couple remixes. But hey, this song reminds me a lot of the sort of gorgeous and melancholy songs that Stephen Malkmus would write in the early ‘90s and decide to relegate to b-side/rarity status in the Pavement discography. Sadie Dupuis’ melodies on “Emma O” are the loveliest she’s written, and she performs the song with a vulnerability that’s striking in the context of her other music, which has been a lot more guarded or obscured with irony or oblique wordplay. She’s singing about a close relationship that’s gone cold and dead, but trying to hold on to it somehow even if it’s exhausting and painful. She seems like she’s almost ready to give up on an intellectual level, but the music betrays all that by expressing a fragility and sentimentality that overrides everything else.

Buy it from Amazon.