It was like I had just dove back into the Odyssey again, but in reality I was only on track one of EMA’s new album, Past Life Martyred Saints. It hits you softly in the beginning like a Warpaint song, but intensifies as you travel more inland. Lead singer Erika M. Anderson, hence the acronym EMA, has put all types of harsh, yet subtle, electronic noises together along with her lyrics that she grabbed from somewhere inside the lucidity of her consciousness to formulate this album.
But as I was, the first song off the album,“Grey Ship,” puts you in a similar place that Bat For Lashes’s “Siren Song” puts you in. It embarks you on an epic, seven-and-change-minute, journey. It’s broken up into three parts; the beginning is a count off into a jam-session-esque style, including that noise you get from a microphone when you catch that empty static. As she’s speaking of a grey ship coming to get her, the music cuts and a slow dark riff carries you into the middle of the sea, lost with “strangers” and “voices calling,” and all together “staring at the pearly gates.” There’s an explosion of orchestral strings, a huge selection of percussion, layered behind and chorus line of EMA’s voice.
“Fuck California, you made me boring.” That’s how this next track starts out. “California” is a memoir; a personal ode to her broken surfaced roots that she grew in California. She reflects half singing, almost in a gospel manner, over an electronic haze of synthesizers, feedback, and reverb (or even comparable to whales conversing). I was curious about her personal vendetta towards the Sunshine State, but she recalls, “Do I hate Cali? Nah. But someone’s gotta rep the darkside of the zeitgeist.”
All of Anderson’s songs embody a sort of soul-bearing, blunt feeling. It’s as if she’s reading these lyrics from scribbled on napkins or the corners of notebook paper. Every song has a particular line that just won’t seem to segment in your head. Like in her song “Anteroom” where she repeats, “if this time through we don’t get it right/I’ll come back to you in another life” over and over again as if she’s rocking back and forth reassuring herself in a corner. Even in the eerie muttered song “Marked” she moans and chants, “I wish that every time you touched me it left a mark.” Not to sound cheesy, but this lyric literally left a mark on me with the achy tone of her voice and the way she seems to strain to push the words out.
Other songs on the album fall into a noise rock-ish, grunge category, which gives her creation more depth, breadth, and texture. “Milkman” has a bit of a Sleigh Bells taste behind it, with the distorted drum beats and that effect on Anderson’s voice that makes her sound like she’s singing into a tin can 40 leagues under the sea. “Butterfly Knife” comes from the same place, but adds in some screeching gang vocals and crunchy guitar.
One song in particular draws a more playful-folkish Kimya Dawson sound. “Coda,” is only a minute long, but it might be my favorite off the album. It rings out in an acapella canon melody, like “row row row your boat” style. It’s simple and a nice break from the rough yelling static at the end of the song that precedes it, “Milkman.” Past Life Martyred Saints is definitely an album to look out for along with its inventor EMA, “digital media artist and guitar destroyer.”
For more information on EMA check out her official website, MySpace, Facebook, pages. Get Past Life Martyred Saints now on iTunes.