Fly 1111: Emma Ogier turns the twang up

Emma Ogier spends her debut album working out how loud she is allowed to be, and the loud parts win. Fly 1111 opens with a voice sunk low in the mix and closes with one that has stopped shouting. The distance between those two points is the album's subject.

She is Houston-born and Nashville-based, and this is her first album, so there is no earlier catalogue to measure it against and no established sound to abandon. Everything here is a first pass at a vocabulary, which buys the record some mess, and it takes the offer. Eden Joel, a fellow Nashville songwriter, guests on Rocksteady/HeavyMetal.

The changes are the sound. Fingerpicked guitar sits under a Texas twang in the voice, then heavy chords arrive and the whole thing lurches toward hard rock. Her vocal is treated differently from song to song: lo-fi and half-buried on the opener, distorted on Hands Tied until the words smear, soft and clear on W2F while the band behind her goes for thunder. That last contrast is the best trick here. She stands still inside her arrangements instead of out-shouting them.

All These Dreams carries the most direct line here, a demand delivered flat: 'You don't know what the fuck it's like to be a girl with all these dreams.' Baby Don't Hurt Me follows and does the pop work, a pleading title set against a chorus with enough meter to stick on one pass. West and Down is where the self-exposure cuts, an admission with no cushion under it: 'I tried to raise the bar / Got too high and missed.'

Hands Tied pushes the other way. Prose-like phrases run together and the distorted vocal makes them hard to follow; that reads as a choice, and it costs the song some of its images. Then the heavy chords and the driving rhythm take over and the argument stops mattering. Rocksteady/HeavyMetal, with Joel, is about a relationship she can't or won't quit, and it builds into an anthem with the word fly shouted over the top. W2F is the hardest thing on the record: brooding riff, thunderous drums, screaming guitars, a soft vocal that gives way at the end to screeches and glitches. It is the one moment the album sounds like it might come apart, and it should have been the last word.

It isn't. Fly comes next, gorgeous and more conventional than anything around it, and Private Power closes on the acceptance that life is transitory, with one sad admission near the end: 'Fucking call me / I don't miss you / Wish you'd want me.' Both songs are well made. Together they let the air out of a record that had been running hot.

It is for anyone who takes Phoebe Bridgers' whisper and wants the guitars turned up, or who liked the idea of Waxahatchee's country leanings but kept waiting for a Led Zeppelin riff to land on top. MJ Lenderman's slack-rock looseness is the nearest neighbour in spirit. Anyone after a clean Americana record should go elsewhere: these songs keep slipping the label, and the slipping is the point.

The flaws are specific. Hands Tied buries its best lines under distortion that does not pay them back. The closing pair, gentle and well sung, arrives after W2F has already raised the ceiling and declines to use it. A debut is allowed a wild swing. This one takes the swing and then apologises for it.

The noise is where Ogier is most herself, and the voice holds up under it. Fly 1111 lands at 3.5 because it finds a harder, stranger thing than a Nashville debut usually permits, then steps back from it in the final two songs. Next time she should trust the riff.

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