EMA
Past Life Martyred Saints
In a recent post on her blog – “lookit that came outta nowhere”, still humbly hosted on WordPress – Erika M. Anderson shares a letter she received from a soldier. “I want to live but i don’t mind dying at the same time / I feel like you and me are the same in that way / Two misfits like two submarines in the sky.” The lines possess some of the quiet force of Anderson’s music, though her lyrics are more firmly rooted in the body: mishaps with men, throw up, a butterfly knife. Anderson wears her initials on a big gold chain for the album art of Past Life Martyred Saints, and as an artist she goes by EMA.
That “misfit extending a hand” vibe is one that Anderson nurtures throughout her solo-debut and Internet presence. Online, she describes growing up “in the dive bars and rotten graveyards of South Dakota” and then fleeing to the West Coast. One song in, and she’s ready to proclaim: “Fuck California, you made me boring.” It’s the most memorable line on the album and one that introduces Anderson’s steady, chanting voice and droning electric guitar.
Listening to Past Life Martyred Saints is like taking that cross-country road trip with Anderson. Though most of the album’s songs run less than four minutes long, they roll with slow shifts in tone as a lamenting Anderson bumps into another stray voice, instrument, or clamoring industrial sound. Odd turns of phrase crop up like eerie landmarks among long stretches of repetition (“Mama’s in the bedroom, don’t you stop” eight times, followed by seven rounds of “you feel just like a breeze to me…”).
Anderson said she “wanted to make a piece that changes fidelity in the middle of the song, from lo-fi to hi-fi,” specifically on opener “Grey Ship.” These cycling crescendos and transitions yield the album’s best moments as she gracefully molds expanses of white space. It’s as if someone threw the xx off a cliff, and Erika M. Anderson got up, dusted herself off and picked up a guitar. (David Getman)