Erika M. Anderson has talked about finding "true bliss and terror" in the live performances of her former band, Gowns. The pressure-cooker atmosphere she and her partner in that group (and in life) Ezra Buchla immersed themselves in had to crack at some point, and it did, fatally and finally, at the beginning of 2010. Anderson's way of propping open an escape hatch from the bruised purging of Gowns was to retreat into herself, by gathering her collective musical ideas and putting them out under her own initials. But it's immediately apparent on hearing Past Life Martyred Saints, her debut full-length as EMA, that she's still all tangled up in "bliss and terror." For the most part, it's a white-knuckle ride. There's no pretense or pose here. No pulling back from the brink to foster an air of cool detachment. Anderson's music has the power to plummet to the depths and drag you right down there with her.
There's a lack of timidity in the way this music is expressed. It's almost as though Anderson snoozed her way through the past decade and is picking up threads that have mostly lain dormant since the early-to-mid 1990s. The boldness in her language, which thematically pings back and forth between emotional and physical duress, has the same naked volatility as Kat Bjelland circa Spanking Machine or Courtney Love in her Pretty on the Inside phase. It's often terrifying, distressing stuff. There's a feeling that you're watching someone in the midst of several life crises. It's a strange kind of testament to Past Life Martyred Saints that it often feels like a daunting proposition to listen to, as if spending too much time with it will leave you as scarred as its creator.
The lyrical fixations here frequently zoom in on Cronenberg-ian body horror, with Anderson exploring the gnarly elasticity of the human frame when it's placed under threat. EMA songs often duck into little mantras; "Butterfly Knife" bears one of the most unnerving of those in its "20 kisses with a butterfly knife" line. "Marked" is similarly nauseating and obsessed with physical abuse. Over a noise that sounds like water chugging down rusty steel piping Anderson devolves into repeating: "I wish that every time he touched me he left a mark." It dwells in the same kind of unsettling territory as Goffin/King's "He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)", and the bare-bones musical arrangement heightens the severity of the message just as Phil Spector's production did on the Crystals' song.
That ability for her arrangements to acutely reflect her lyrical mood is one of Anderson's trump cards. She knows exactly when to add and subtract elements, bringing "Marked" out of the doldrums at its close with a warm organ tone that she deploys whenever things get a little too heavy (see also: "Milkman"). The opening "The Grey Ship" is one of her most ambitious conceits in that regard. It shifts in style several times, from its earthy, folk-y opening to a midsection where all the instrumentation vanishes suddenly as if the bottom just fell out of the world.
It's a sign of her confidence and ambition that she can open the record with such a multi-faceted song, full of odd diversions and unexpected twists that need multiple plays to really sink in. But the hit-rate here is high. "California" is among Anderson's best works, a stream-of-consciousness rant about displacement and alienation set to a musical backing that feels like civilization collapsing around her. "California" shows off her enviable talent for finding a comfortable place where big-topic sloganeering and personal tales can coexist. It's that sweat-soaked head-rush of repulsion, sadness, anxiety, and nostalgia you get when you feel the tug of home.
Past Life Martyred Saints is a fiercely individual record, made by a musician with a fearless and courageous approach to her art. Crucially, the desire to let such raw emotion out in song never feels forced. It simply wouldn't work this well if there was a hint of artifice, or a suggestion that Anderson hadn't regurgitated all these feelings of loss, loathing, and rejection from a pit of genuinely volatile emotion. There's a conviction to her delivery that leaves you in no doubt that this is something she needed to flush out of her system. Comparisons can certainly be drawn to artists such as Patti Smith or Cat Power, and her dry, deadpan delivery occasionally orbits the same sphere as Kim Gordon's vocal work with Sonic Youth. But this is Anderson's own brittle unease. It hits as hard as a cold slap in the face-- and will leave its mark on you.
