EMA:
Past Life Martyred Saints
(Souterrain Transmissions)
Early in the year, I listened to PJ Harvey’s Let England Shake, the 2011 equivalent to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. I liked it a lot, considered it Harvey’s best since Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, and wrote a positive review for it, with the intent of having it published in the local newspaper. However, listening to the album a few more times, I found that its novelty wore off quickly, and I soon considered it just another record in the same category as Uh Huh Her and White Chalk. No better, no worse. Now, with the record being called the very best of the year by so many music publications, I’m going to just come out and say it: it’s not that great. EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints, on the other hand, is everything that Let England Shake has been said to be, and more.
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Unlike P.J. Harvey, Erika M. Anderson (or EMA) is a new artist, and thus doesn’t have the cred required to have her album rank alongside Let England Shake. Regardless, I find this album to be the next step in feist-rock. That’s a term I came up with, realizing that there wasn’t really a term to describe this specific sect in music: women, either pissed off, depressed, or both, proving they can out-sing and out-play any man with enough balls to challenge them. It can be traced back to Joni Mitchell, and maybe even back to The Shangri-Las but, undeniably, the first true feist-rock artist was Patti Smith. Kim Gordon continued with it in the ‘80s, and it finally erupted in the ‘90s with artists like Alanis Morissette and Liz Phair, and riot grrrl bands like Sleater-Kinney and L7. In the ‘00s, the genre experienced a drought, with most women in rock either being background players (like Meg White and Peggy Wang) or just tame frontwomen, sometimes under the control of a male lyricist or producer who don’t use them to their full potential. However, just when all hope looks to be lost, here comes EMA, easily the best feist-rock artist that I’ve heard since Karen O, and definitely more original.
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This album’s sound can be summed up as a mix between Joni Mitchell and Sonic Youth. If that doesn’t get your attention, then you’re too difficult to impress, and I feel bad for any potential suitors. I was fascinated by this album’s sound the minute it started, and my fascination continued until the end of the last track. But, as with all great albums, what makes Past Life Martyred Saints worth a listen is the songs. Sound be damned; sound can only get you so far. You need to have the songs, and this album certainly has some incredible songs. The opening track, “The Grey Ship,” is a seven-minute epic, featuring echoed vocals and some of the most interesting tempo changes I’ve heard in a long time. The lyrics read like a poet’s description of a nightmare:
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Blue sky is silver blue sky is grey
When the grey ship calls I am leaving today
I thought it would come
I thought it would come
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The two tracks that follow, “California” and “Anteroom,” are my favorites. “California” continues the album’s experimentation, while also providing a gorgeous tune that, at one point, strangely steals the melody of “Camptown Races.” “Anteroom” tops “California,” though, by proving that EMA can make a pretty normal rock song. It’s the least unusual track on the album but, with a bluesy guitar riff and very good lyrics (“If this time through/We don’t get it right/I’ll come back to you/In another life”), it’s my personal favorite. These two tracks are so perfect, that you would think everything would grind to a halt after them, the majority of the album’s remainder being mere disappointments. But, the album keeps rolling along with “Milkman,” another fairly standard rock song, but a damn interesting one. Then, “Marked” comes in, making it useless to call any of the other tracks “dark” or “mysterious.” After “Marked,” none of the other songs even deserve to be labeled “weird.” This is the track where you realize that any semblance of normalcy on the prior tracks were misleading, and that EMA is here to drag you to Hell and tell you that you deserve no better. This is the eeriest song I’ve heard in a long time and, if you need a reason to listen to the full album, just listen to that track for a minute. Either you’ll be sucked in, or you’ll know instantly that the record isn’t for you.
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The final three tracks end the album well. “Breakfast” is gorgeou, and very lullaby-esque, “Butterfly Knife” is infectious enough to make you stop shitting yourself after hearing “Marked,” and “Red Star” is the type of song that you would expect to end an album like this: long, droney, strange, but not too strange, and memorable. A fine closing.
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What makes a great debut album? Well, great songs, of course, but (as Lester Bangs once said) anybody can write great songs. A better question is, what makes the songs on Past Life Martyred Saints stick out compared the ones on Let England Shake? I believe that, more than anything, it’s how convincible EMA makes them. When she sings “My arms they are a/See through plastic/They're a bloodless plastic/Skinless plastic,” she’s not singing as Erika M. Anderson. She’s singing as EMA, the depressed, angry, senile girl who you don’t want to fuck with under any circumstances. I’m glad that I understand the difference between reality and art because, if I didn’t, this album would make me go insane, knowing that there’s a girl out there this twisted and deranged.
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Still, even though I’m fond of this album, would I call it groundbreaking? No, probably not. I’m not going to pretend like this sound is completely new, or that EMA is going to change music. But, this record is excellent now, and I’ll take an excellent sounding album over an influential one any day. Just because The xx is probably going to be remembered more than Avi Buffalo in the long run doesn’t make them better, and I sincerely hope that I’m still listening to Past Life Martyred Saints ten years from now rather than, say, Destroyer’s Kaputt.
