It’s not every day you hear a cover of a cover, but with a song as malleable as Manchester Orchestra’s “The Gold,” such a quantity becomes possible. Folk phenom Emma Harner takes a stab at this endeavor, creating a version aimed at paralleling Phoebe Bridgers’ ultra-popular take on the track.
Harner pares back Bridgers’ re-recording of the original rock song further, leaving behind a pleasant, but slightly exaggerated product. Given the sound she’s associated with, that’s no surprise — Harner gained online notoriety mostly for her exacting strumming methodology, dubbed “math folk” in honor of its parallels to math rock’s off-kilter rhythmic patterns. These sensibilities take center stage within this track as she swoons around Manchester Orchestra’s lyrics about a laborious relationship, her signature mode of playing providing colorful accents throughout.
That being said, the circuitous mode Harner occasionally slips into does little to expand the song’s horizons or even subvert the listener’s expectations, instead swerving into slightly grating territory. Frankly, the singer-songwriter’s hyper-skilled strumming, combined with intense vocal rises and dips, would simply hit much harder if she withheld herself slightly. As recorded in “The Gold,” these traits sometimes come off as gratuitous, a drawback found in some of Harner’s other released material. Case in point: her most recent LP, “Evening Star,” suffered slightly from a tendency towards the extremities in her repertoire.
At this particular recording’s highest points, though, Harner takes the gentle vulnerability inherent to Bridgers’ version and lays it bare, creating a kind of rawness that stands to startle the listener. Were she to take the space to give these moments proper spaced-out emphasis, rather than continually impress her acoustic talent, both this particular double-cover and her future records would benefit.