EMA
Past Life Martyred Saints
Rating: 4.4/5.0
Label: Souterrain Transmissions
Kathleen Hanna’s file cabinet – along with her photographs, master copies of zines, original recordings, media clippings, Xeroxed flyers, even a navy blue baby doll dress said to be the very one from the cover of Bikini Kill’s Pussy Whipped (dress and album both smackdown essentials to rebel girls everywhere) – is itself cataloged. Issued an acquisition number, creatively indexed, likely barcoded and available (only) for scholarly inspection, the dinged-up, sticker-plastered metal cabinet and the ephemera it contained is part of the recently-collated Riot Grrrl Collection at NYU’s Fales Library. In many ways these items are things-as-artifacts (i.e. What is a zine? What do you mean by “Xerox”? Is a file cabinet something like an external hard drive?) and the preservation of this material, from many points of view, is paramount. But it’s also a post-feminist concession that the riot grrrl movement is something that was; something that happened, is over and is far enough removed in the past that it’s eligible for a clinical post-mortem. To be sure, that restless defiance didn’t disappear; today we have women like M.I.A. and Merrill Garbus of tUnE-yArDs – confrontational and cerebral – and dirty-bird girl bands like the Dum Dum Girls and Frankie Rose and the Outs – dominating in their garage-fuzz jangles – coming at it from different access points. And while MAYA is an album that attacks your brain and I Will Be makes you buck your hips, there’s comparatively little out there that is saturated with blood, saliva, hair, bile. Erika Anderson (recording as EMA) seizes these viscera and in Past Life Martyred Saints, reanimates with brave depravity the motifs of a movement long since laid to rest.
“Grey Ship” is a chilling opener, a seven-plus minute psychodrama in three acts: pursuit, capture, kill. The acoustic strums are steady and localized as she muses about the approaching menace of this ship in an exhausted sing-song, “I thought it would come from further north than that” – as if sad only that her doom is too easily executed. And then a low, sustained bass tone drops like a sudden anchor, the bottoming-out of the loudest heartbeat. She catalogs here the inhabitants of the ship, from mother to spinster to “strangers with wet hair,” against a counter-melodic lyrical phrase of “I hear them call/ I hear them sing for me.” Her vocals get louder, the ominous rumbling of the toms grows insistent, the desperation builds, culminating in a violent, syncopated, percussive trap. Beats later she leaves us sailing out to sea quietly, feeling “nothing, and nothing, and nothing, and nothing,” voice tremulous, broken, reservedly terrified.
The lyrical messages – like on “Grey Ship” – are full of unusual metaphors, often damaged, subversively sick, yet somehow empowering. While the poetry alone compels attention, the way in which Past Life’s musicality embodies Anderson’s emotion is what gives this album the preternatural power of a bloodletting. “Coda” and its following companion track “Marked” are near perfect in this respect. Anderson and fellow ex-Gowns member Ezra Buchla duet unaccompanied on the former, singing the same words but in staggered cadences and with divergent intonations. Buchla’s performance is deeply affecting: as Anderson croons her lyrics with a straightforward, sweet breathiness, Buchla draws out the syllables in some sort of tribal yodel released heavenward. The a capella section ends as the track switches over to “Marked,” Anderson’s vocals backed by an almost toneless, loose buzziness, as if the guitar strings have just about completely come unwound from their pegs. The amped scraping of the fingers up the strings seems more relevant than the chords themselves as she describes with drugged-out detachment her arms of “secret bloodless skinless mess.” Buchla reemerges, creeping in softly before getting abusive. Anderson’s voice is steady as she repeats the warped mantra, “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark,” but Buchla’s vocal mutates: tentative at first, then a disconcerting growl, then overtaking her with a psychopathic aggression, each time sucking air in through his teeth as one does when inflicting and/or enjoying pain. His presence though is not so much a second figure in the room; another interpretation is that she is singing with herself, this unhinged voice her own channeled masochism, hers, head-lolling passivity. And for all of this – the songs reconciles in major chord lucidity though the same dark verse was delivered only moments ago in a completely different compositional context.
Anderson’s range on Past Life – emotionally, musically, vocally – is severely dynamic. Uninhibited by her own messed-up multiplicities, she rides out those manifestations to great effect. “California” is less sung than artfully recited, her litany of hurts, apologies, regrets and refusals rattled off coolly like Kim Gordon over a slog of viscous bass, reverbed thudding and intermittent piano chords. She’s unglued, distorted and wailing on “Butterfly Knife,” but on closer “Red Star” vacillates between a demure mew and, overpowering even the cymbal crashes that accompany it, a towering pillar of volume.
To take so many chances, to be so many people, to conjure such vaguely but acutely unsettling associations, the vulnerability is so present that it ceases to be descriptive. It’s not that she took some powerful risks here and there, this whole fucking record is a risk. Truly, it’s riveting, it’s thrilling. And though from the sounds of it she is made up of doll parts, it would be false to categorize EMA as a riot grrrl revivalist in a copycat sense, though Kathleen Hanna is probably somewhere respecting the hell out of this record. It is after all a new generation, and culture and context require immolation as well as innovation. So while Courtney Love might’ve extended her middle finger more than a few times back in the day, Erika Anderson is instead photographed on the cover of Past Life with her fingers arranged in a lazy pistol. The light on her fingertips makes it look sort of like a golden gun; just like her, cocked, deadly and illuminating.
by Stacey Pavlick
Key Tracks: Coda, Grey Ship, California
