Album Review

EMA – Past Life Martyred Saints

• 23rd May 2011

This is everything you want from a debut album – rich with talent and musically adroit, it’s polished enough to impress but remains refreshingly young, earnest, angry and intense.

This, the first solo album from American Erika M Anderson (formerly of Gowns) starts with her seven-minute single ‘The Grey Ship’, with its slow, hypnotic acoustics and blasts of electronic noise. It’s followed by the confrontational ‘California’, which feels like a rap-style exorcism of her LA demons. So – we’re tested with an air of f*ck off defiance – if you can’t cope with these two, then this album probably ain’t for you.

‘Past Life Martyred Saints’ is messed-up stuff – it almost feels wrong to take such pleasure in listening to it. But what a spine-tingling pleasure it is. We get lyrics that are scarily honest and more than a little bitter. The music’s grimy and powerful, punched through with harsh guitars and feedback, but interspersed with tuneful, almost traditional, sweetness. Anderson’s voice, too, ranges from gritty and harsh to touchingly angelic.

The mid point of the album is perhaps where EMA’s eclectic style is most successful. ‘Milkman’ blends Beck-style fuzz and whistle with crashing drums and wailing guitars. ‘Code’ provides a strange respite of acapella harmonies and vintage American roots music juxtaposed against drug-related lyrics. It then segues effortlessly into the torturously moving ‘Marked’, whose haunting beginning sounds like it was recorded at the bottom of a metal silo. The sound of fingers screeching down the frets echoes in the silence, hitting a nerve, before the song soars off with a sad and vulnerable grace.

‘Past Life Martyred Saints’ is as dramatic and naive as the name suggests, but it feels solidly grounded in a rather painful reality. It’s a tantalisingly perverse mixture of suffering and beauty. And it is quite simply the most exciting thing I’ve heard in a very, very long time.