EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints

um, excuse me, random poster?

i was heavily sedated when i wrote all that so you might want to take it with a pinch of salt. But i've already expressed up there what the record is and specifically what it isn't doing. I'm a simple man, and i see it thusly: are any of the parts worthy of note? Lyrically, song wise, sonically, in terms of personality or mystique or emotion.. no. Is it more than the sum of its parts? No.

I can see why most things are picked up by your mainstream-ish media outlets. I can see the appeal of an Animal Collective, or an Odd Future. But i can't see what appeals about this. It's not just a case of not liking it, it's that i don't get what makes it stand out. I suppose it must have affected some people, and more power to them. But not I

*cacophanous applause*

And Anteroom sounds to my ears like Pod-era Breeders.

Yes! It's a great song. The whole album evokes a certain 90s-ness (in a good way) for me, if that makes any sense. In any case, I liked the album, and I think the critical praise it's getting is deserved.

i was heavily sedated when i wrote all that so you might want to take it with a pinch of salt

Swallow your own poison, kid.

so why is 'coda' sequenced before a song it is a 'coda' to

okay, so i've been thinking about the objections raised in this thread and what i like about PLMS:

"grey ship" opens the album in a placeless void, a low-fidelity recording of rudimentary guitar strumming and disaffected vocals. though merrill's voice maneuvers a bit within the simple chord progression, the song is more drone than melody, woozy organ washes only enhancing the sense of stasis when they arrive. the lyrics sketch vaguely poetic circles around death in the form a grey "ship you can't see." this is a familiar sound and subject, not too far removed from cat power's early recordings. though the result is quite evocative, imo, i can see why some might be tempted to dismiss EMA's approach here as mere 90s nostalgia, done better, done before.

a few minutes in, however, the lo-fi haze reveals itself not as working method but as coloration, parting dramatically to make room for a descending electric guitar figure and a massive, buzzing synth tone that rises like thick, black fog, both elements much more smoothly recorded than the introductory verses. layers of wordless vocals complete the transition, and suddenly we're moving fast, over, a tripping rhythm, through a much darker place. the lyrics, when they re-emerge, describe "a choir, a symphony," both literally and figuratively. in and with this choir, merrill invokes a sisterhood of death: mother, sister, friend, "spinster" aunt and a self with "mouth full of glass," all apparently lost to the world. the vague specter we first encountered as a grey ship is now personalized as family, as history, even as a state of being.

the song of this mortal chorus grows louder and louder, backed at its climax by slashing guitars and a stuttering, headbanging beat, waves in storm, before breaking on total silence. from here the calmly resigned voice we remember from those "placeless" introductory verses returns to announce location: "great grandmother lived on a prarie," it whispers, where "nothing and nothing and nothing." the song's closing line, "i got the same feelin inside of me," finally locates this emptiness as an intimation of death the narrator carries within, wherever she might go.

i love this, the whole progression from a plain of cryptic absence, down through a darkly gleaming underworld and back to the shores of a nothing that no longer seems so empty, now flutters with ghosts. it's beautiful in itself, it makes perfect, clear sense of the album's vocal and musical decisions, and it carries enormous thematic weight. more than anything else, it's just plain beautiful, building a fascinating odyssey out of a few simple tools. i've listened to this song many, many times over the past week, and to my mind, it exists in no shadow save its own.

bought the LP yesterday, basically as a tithe for enjoying the music so much. sounds great on vinyl, but god, the packaging/design is atrocious.

Merrill's voice? I'm now picturing some odd mashup between EMA and tUnE-yArDs.

Which might actually be amazing if EMA sang & Merrill looped, so thanks for putting that unattainable musical image in my head.

duh, wrote that when i first woke up, lol. jesus christ. was feeling all proud of myself, too.

I MEAN ERIKA! kill me now.

signs of aging number eleventy-thousand

Ha ha, apart from that, I was really liking your review...

(for a minute I thought I'd missed something)

It's okay. I can't get excited by it.

― Brooker T Buckingham, Thursday, May 19, 2011 6:32 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

I can't even write a decent sentence about it. I think maybe I've heard it all before? It's kind of trope-laden.

― Brooker T Buckingham, Thursday, May 19, 2011 6:36 AM (1 week ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

these are the posts in this thread i most agree with. it's okay, it's just...there. she does a good job of painting her world but she doesn't really pull me into it.

Hah, I had money on you being a frothing-mouth hater.

Nah, this has enough of early 90s not-quite-riot-grrrl-but-strong-female-grunger that it would hit some of his buttons.

The funny thing is, this thread has over 100 posts, mostly of people going "it's a decent enough album, but why the hype?" but then something like the Barbara Panther thread has, like 4 people all going "this is great!" and only a dozen posts.

So the real question isn't so much "why is this artist so popular?" but "why is this thread so popular?" and the answer to that is more easily answered.

It's not like it's getting Animal Collective-level hype or anything. Unless "positive reviews" equal hype by definition.

If you took out all the "why the hype?" posts this thread would have like four people going "this is great!" as well.

haha kate i checked this out purely because i saw you liked it!

barbara panther is also on my list too.

Nah, this has enough of early 90s not-quite-riot-grrrl-but-strong-female-grunger that it would hit some of his buttons.

The funny thing is, this thread has over 100 posts, mostly of people going "it's a decent enough album, but why the hype?" but then something like the Barbara Panther thread has, like 4 people all going "this is great!" and only a dozen posts.

So the real question isn't so much "why is this artist so popular?" but "why is this thread so popular?" and the answer to that is more easily answered.

― Karen D. Tregaskin, Thursday, 26 May 2011 12:28 (56 minutes ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

It's not like it's getting Animal Collective-level hype or anything. Unless "positive reviews" equal hype by definition.

If you took out all the "why the hype?" posts this thread would have like four people going "this is great!" as well.

― Matt DC, Thursday, 26 May 2011 12:32 (52 minutes ago) Bookmark

i don't know -- i think people are getting allergic to expressing enthusiasm on here, to some degree; people are keener to exhibit themselves as being too smart to like something than they are to admit liking it

If you took out all the "why the hype?" posts this thread would have like four people going "this is great!" as well.

That is exactly my point.

Yet the activity on this thread makes the artist look more "ILM-approved" (whatever that means). Just wondering why some *threads* expand and others don't, I suppose.

EMA's a complex listen, that's all.

enh, it's not like people are actually trying to unpack it

Contenderizer was doing a pretty good job upthread

Jeez - Lex, Matt and Owen, just go and listen to a BP YouTube already. If it's too scando-quirky for you, you can come back and smack me in the eye with The Knife's winter mittens or something.

I like EMA because it reminds me a lot of that kind of dense, dark proto-grunge a la Kim Deal and Kim Gordon and early Hole that I still have a lot of love for. And lots of noisy songwriters get a lot of props for reviving the dense grunge wall o sound thing, but they don't have that slightly aggressive, slightly bored, slightly unhinged very intense femme thing which does it for me. EMA crosses the line from the more common dark and spooky (Warpaint) to dark and actually a little bit scary, but in a way that excites me.

It's not the best record in the world, ever, no, but it does a thing I happen to like, rather well. Damning with faint praise, eh?

What is BP?
Karen, I'm reading this thread because I like this record a little and I want to like it more

the comment about the "90s-ness" of this album is totally OTM

Barbara Panther?

(Nothing like EMA at all, Rwandan electronic eurodisco lady from Brussells via Berlin, supposedly slightly Bjorkish of vocal tone and general artiness)

Public service stanning over, now back to your EMA thread already in progress.

EMA album is kinda Kim Gordon meets Mogwai...

So yeah, totally 90s.

slightly aggressive, slightly bored, slightly unhinged very intense femme thing which does it for me. EMA crosses the line from the more common dark and spooky (Warpaint) to dark and actually a little bit scary, but in a way that excites me.

karen OTM here, and so's everyone else in noticing that the basic sound and attitude have their roots in the 90s. imo, we've got the requisite 20 years distance on that era, so a revive seems appropriate.

after spending some time with this record, especially given that i'm listening to the vinyl, i want to break it in half. the first side consists of only four songs, delivered in just under 20 minutes: "grey ship", "california", "anteroom" and "milkman". it works beautifully, each of the songs rooted, yes, in the not-quite-punk girl rock of the early-to-mid 90s: kim gordon, the breeders, cat power, bardo pond, etc. a combination of sensual languor and suppressed violence, served cool. each song, however, brings something distinctive (if not quite "new") to the table, configuring a familiar set of influences in novel & exciting ways.

went over "grey ship" above, and i love the way it contrasts with "california", the first song's haunted emptiness suddenly switched out for an anesthetized torch drone locked in on gritty detail, on names and places, with a simple, strong vocal melody to carry it all along. the ghosts don't disappear here, but we're no longer in their country - we're in the place to which they've followed, stuck somewhere between this world and the next. by the song's end, we've abandoned the vision of california, find ourselves stranded again on the gray shores of death ("i saw grandma carrying the gun / the gun the gun the gun"). especially love the use of shoegaze elements to create something that can't be easily summarized as pretty, psychedelic or crushing.

love, too, the contrast between the dark, smudgy wooze of those first two songs and the bright, sad elliott smith pop of "anteroom", they way it briefly lift us not out of darkness, but out of the dark, haunted body, into the air above. a song about ghosts and the failure of love, struggling to escape all ghosts and failure. it's an easy and obvious move, perhaps, but it works exceptionally well, maintaining the album's nocturnal flow while allowing in a smear of melodic light.

side 1 ends with "milkman", hardly the album's strongest track, but at least it perks things up a bit, trading "anteroom"'s deathly glow for beats, chaos and unsuppressed violence, erika's voice growing spikes, tearing at resignation's comfortable cocoon. it's a song about sex and distrust, perhaps betrayal, given an obliquely threatening twist in the form of a "milkman" who waits on the lawn, sees and knows all, an omen of strange, stilted decency. like all of EMA's songs, it carries a snarling, erotic tension, but here for the first time that tension is addressed.

and that's the first side. the second's pretty great, too, with "marked" and "breakfast" standing out. depending on my mood, PLMS can start to drag a bit during the longish last two songs, but it's solid throughout. each track brings its own ideas to the table, and no one precisely duplicates the style of another. i admit that it's not an album of great melodic or sonic innovation, and i suppose that's why some object to the small acclaim it's attracted. it gets by, instead, on personality and vibe, like old horror movies, on cultivating and sustaining an atmosphere. on that level, it succeeds completely. anyway, why should nostalgia be an objectionable quality in a record that's so obsessed with the past?

that came out long

No, that was pretty spot-on.

New video for Marked:

http://pitchfork.com/tv/musicvideos/1415-marked/

Hard to work out how I feel about it but I wonder if that isn't the idea?

really don't like get this. album does nothing for me and video is cringe.

Really? I love the album. Can't watch the vid as am at work.

i wasn't nuts about her debut, but she's somebody i think i'd check out in the future to see if her "very now" schtick translates. her whole aesthetic of buzz of 90s guitarplay will assuredly be worn out come a couple years, hopefully epitomized by a fatal stage accident involving Yuck

I wrote up a brief review of the album when it was new for a publication that decided not to publish it for whatever (possibly apparent) reason. So it doesn't go to waste, here it is:

“I wish that every time he touched me left a mark,” Erika M. Anderson sings on one of many brutally harrowing moments on the ex-Gowns singer’s solo debut Past Life Martyred Saints. Accordingly, this is an album fixated on laying bare the scars of experience, physical or otherwise. “Butterfly Knife” remembers a high school acquaintance’s ritual of self-inflicted wounds. “California” finds the author cursing the failure of her runaway destination to deliver on implicit promises of free love and character building all while recalling the Old Testament fury that bruised her small town upbringing. Less explicitly, yet somehow more frightening for it, “Milkman” and “Breakfast” evoke the inexplicable horrors of childhood, once through seething tantrum and again through a sinister nursery rhyme mutter.

Anderson’s performances ensure that you feel her pain. When she’s quiet, its unbearably intimate and tactile, with each sweep over an acoustic guitar string registering as sharp and threatening as a knife blade held to your throat. When she’s loud, its blurry and discordant, the sound of barely-clung-to sanity. Yet her fierce conviction in her art makes for a singularly exhilarating and even faith restoring listen, if not exactly a feel-good one.

Mmm she reminds me of a much less insecure Chan Marshall on that marked video. That particular song brings the cat power reference but it seems her overall look for the video is spot on... is she willfully trying to mimic her?

yes

in that she is simultaneously 'making music' and 'being a woman'

Unlike Baby Dee.

she forgot to mimic the writing good songs and having an interesting voice bit though

it just sorta infuriates me when reviews triumph an artist for "echoing" a more well-known act, is all. that EMA evokes kim gordon isn't something i naturally think of as a prize-worthy positive. my same sentiments apply to "Girls" entire existence... it's this attitude that we've reached "the end" of music, and our only choice is to fall-back and reinvent the wheel by constantly adopting past styles thanks to "the wealth of information: the internet!". i mean, maybe it was inevitable at some point but part of the reason i've always fawned over the 90s is that it's always felt like the last progressive decade in music.

woah tangent

how do you really feel?

i still think 'california' is a total jam

I liked that tangent.

Yes. Rant away.

I liked this act for awhile but then I made the critical error of downloading the 16 minute b-side to The Grey Ship. Barf out people!!!

^^

Still haven't heard that, but it'd take a lot to undo this album for me. Plus, eh, it's a b-side.

Also, her Daytrotter session, including a new regular-length song.

it just sorta infuriates me when reviews triumph an artist for "echoing" a more well-known act, is all. that EMA evokes kim gordon isn't something i naturally think of as a prize-worthy positive. my same sentiments apply to "Girls" entire existence... it's this attitude that we've reached "the end" of music, and our only choice is to fall-back and reinvent the wheel by constantly adopting past styles thanks to "the wealth of information: the internet!". i mean, maybe it was inevitable at some point but part of the reason i've always fawned over the 90s is that it's always felt like the last progressive decade in music.

woah tangent

― Hullo, I'm Jon Moss (kelpolaris)

This sort of 'my generation had it better' point of view feels to me like missing the big picture. Art has been improving and imitating itself since birth, this has nothing to do with the internet.

Also the 90s in style was easier to pin down... way more homogenic and derivative than the ones from past decade.