Souterrain Transmissions (9th May 2011)
Rating: ****
Past Life Martyred Saints is the solo debut from former Gowns frontwoman EMA (Erika M. Anderson, who was interviewed for this very magazine very recently) and a work of startling honesty, pulsing with raw emotion, brutal imagery and confrontational, provocative lyrics.
Those lyrics certainly have the power to shock. In ‘Butterfly Knife’, for example, EMA recounts a messy suicide, while she confesses that ‘I wish every time you touched me left a mark’ in ‘Marked’. There’s a splash of blood, too, in ‘California’, where she deadpans ’I bled all my blood out, but these red pants they don’t show tha’. These are angry words, written to inflict shock and surprise on the listener. ‘Fuck you’, she sings on that latter track, ‘you made me boring’; certainly not, it would seem.
The effect of such deeply personal writing is, at first, acutely discomforting. And dreamy, stream-of-consciousness experiments such as in the seven-and-a-half minute opener ‘The Grey Ship’ might seem a little wilfully obtuse. But stay with EMA and her sometimes Karen O-alike vocal and you start to get it, enjoy it, and even see the softer side. Because though it might at times feel too harsh and unrelenting, there is also comfort in the warmth and empathy that so refreshingly punctuates the album. This is nothing if not a work of contrasts, verging on paradox: the personal and the universal, the lo-fi and hi-tech, the ups and downs – an album brimming with quiet noisiness.
A South Dakota native, EMA has nevertheless absorbed many ideas from throughout the US, from the hallucenogenic Americana of ‘California’, to the lullaby qualities in ‘Butterfly Knife’, via the southern gothic of ‘Coda’; this is a record that mixes flavours. Besides the standouts already mentioned are ‘Milkman’, where the motley ingredients come together and Past Life Martyred Saints really thumps and flies, to ‘Anteroom’, which EMA self-deprecatingly refers to as her ‘(only) grunge song’, and which truly does feel like a time capsule from the mid-Nineties (EMA could totally have played ‘The Bronze’ in another life).
Past Life Martyred Saints might be a bit of an acquired taste, but when you’ve sampled its complex and deft blend of styles (and you should do), it is a surprising, haunting, nostalgia-prodding record, more affecting than you might have initially imagined, and more than a little bit impressive.
Past Life Martyred Saints is available to buy in the iTunes store.
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