Aaron Embry – Tiny Prayers Review

Your prayers for nasally-voiced indie folk have been answered.

2012, Community Music

5.4 / 10.0

If you’ve been reaching out to a holy entity in search of nasally voiced indie folk, your prayers have been answered with the release of Aaron Embry’s debut full-length Tiny Prayers. With his fragile tenor, Embry projects himself as a sensitive (maybe a bit timid) songwriter while reaching higher levels of stuffy-nosed delivery than The Decemberists’ Colin Meloy. Tiny Prayers’s woodsy production is vastly open – Embry’s voice carries across infinitely stretching plains and plateaus – while country folk touchstones of harmonica and acoustic strumming make up the album’s arrangements.

“Good Red Road Man” is the album’s strongest moment of tension; feeling like a showdown in the Wild West. For the most part, Tiny Prayers is a safe, baby-proofed listen without much challenge. Embry isn’t without some decent lines, “And when I die / There are certain songs I know I’d like to sing / But I’d just as soon step aside / And let the angels do their thing”, from “To The One”. However, his echo-heavy singing falls kind of flat, often getting lost behind the songs’ arrangements. On the album’s final track, “Your Heart and Mine”, Embry injects some much needed personality into the song, likely as a way of diffusing the song’s dark fantasy of an impending Armageddon. If only more of the songs had been about the end of the world, then Embry would have gone for broke. Maybe we’ll hear those prayers in the future.

Purchase: Aaron Embry – Tiny Prayers

Download Aaron Embry – “Moon of the Daylit Sky”:

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