EMA - The Future's Void

EMA, that is Erika M. Anderson, formerly of depressing experimental drug-rock duo Gowns, made ripples on the hipster sea back in 2011 with her solo debut, Past Life Martyred Saints, which was an absolute stonker of an album; heartfelt in its distress, personal yet otherworldly, and packed with gloriously bold levels of variety, from the bonkers to the beautiful. Three years later, she’s back with The Future’s Void, a matter-of-factly polemic title which betrays this second album’s overarching theme of our exciting new maybe-dystopian lives in the Information Age and beyond. The new world order forming around us in the wake of the Internet Revolution has become an alluring concept for artists of all kinds across the globe, all of whom are undoubtedly hoping – as much as they might deny it – to be the ones to truly encapsulate the zeitgeist of this exciting and bewildering period of human history. The Future’s Void is an album that retains the exasperated angst of its predecessor, but throws it into a more ambitious thematic scope, with interesting and varied results.

I was faintly disappointed when I read the album title, saw the Oculus on the cover, listened to a couple of the tracks and realised that this was an album with a ‘modern life’ sort of concept, since I’d fallen in love with EMA on her last album thanks to her offerings of those more timeless and analog miseries like abuse, emptiness and self-harm, which made no attempts to be topical or generational, and were the all the greater for that. Immediately, on The Future’s Void, you can tell that the more personal side of Anderson’s songwriting has been compromised, and while that’s not necessarily a bad thing, and second albums that fail to deviate from those before them run the risk of sounding creatively stagnant, for me EMA’s – and in fact Gowns’ – appeal was the personal touch that made all the heartache in the songs truly palpable. Not to mention the fact that writing any music about ‘the Internet’ is cause for alarm. Shit, my last review was of St. Vincent’s self-titled tirade about life in the Twitter epoch, and songs like ‘Digital Witness’ are a singularly rare success in this area.

But enough moaning about boring things like ‘themes’ and ‘ideas’, let’s talk about the music, shall we? Past Life Martyred Saints had a thrillingly eclectic range of sounds – folky guitars, thundering drums, graceless space-age synthesisers – and this continues in much the same vein here. However, the real warhead in Anderson’s arsenal is her voice – capable at performing a decent tune, sure, but also a material in itself to be manipulated and layered into a variety of forms. Unlike another Anderson, the one from The Knife with the extra ‘s’, EMA doesn’t mangle her voice or distort it beyond its humanity. Instead, all throughout this album, most notably on tracks like ‘Solace’ and ‘Satellites’, Anderson is joined by a choir of herself, creating vocal sections that are lushly put together, and make her raspy inflection all the sweeter to listen to. Whether she’s going grunge on ‘So Blonde’, industrial on ‘Smoulder’, or soft as a whisper on ‘3Jane’, it’s Anderson’s voice which really succeeds in drawing the emotion out of her songs, and every line is sang with conviction – cool, clamouring, disinterested and desperate all at the same time.

The opener, ‘Satellites’, is a marvellously apocalyptic call-to-arms with deranged movements from tragic choral interludes to whistling distortion and a death-knell bass tone. ‘So Blonde’ is plucked straight out of the nineties, awesome or derivative depending on your cynicism. ‘3Jane’ is a lost-sounding and reflective ballad that might just be the album’s highlight, misty-eyed and beautifully sung. On her blog, Anderson described ‘3Jane’ as the ‘lyrical centrepiece of the record’, and talks about trying to control her online image while living in constant worry of having a visible online presence now that cunts like me are finding out who she is. ‘It’s all just a big advertising campaign’, she bemoans wistfully on the record. ‘Disassociation, I guess it’s just a modern disease’. It might all sounds a little preachy, but it’s sang with such bored surrender that it kills to listen to. ‘I get stressed out and I wanna get high / it’s cos I’ve seen my face and I don’t recognise the person that I feel inside’. Anderson’s lyrics are unrefined and directly talk about ‘selfies’ and ‘interwebs’ with an artistic-mindedness that might make some internet users a little uncomfortable, but I find them captivating. Some of the lyrics, apparently, didn’t even make it past being made up on the spot, and I like this rough-around-the-edges quality, as well as the imagery of lines like ‘we just smoulder where the flames went out’, even if the intended mondegreens of ‘earn/urn’ and ‘might lose some fur/my Lucifer’ are a bit befuddling at times.

EMA seems to be reaching for the bigger-sounding tracks on this album. ‘Satellites’, as mentioned before, intends to be as stratospheric as its title, and ‘Smoulder’ is slow and sweeping and satisfyingly grand. Perhaps the weakest effort on the album is ‘Cthulu’, which is appropriately aiming for largeness and impact, but its constant, repeated hook doesn’t generate the gravitas that its creator might’ve originally hoped, and its epic denouement would’ve been more effective had it been built on sturdier foundations. It’s not like EMA can’t write long, huge-sounding songs – ‘Grey Ship’, from the previous album, is a mind-blowing affair, as is Gowns masterpiece ‘White Like Heaven’, but ‘Cthulu’ isn’t great. ‘Neuromancer’ is better, with its stomping drumbeat backed up by machine-gun fire, but all of these big-arena belters, for all their volume, are missing the emotional impact that comes with EMA’s more understated material. Conversely, the ringing piano chords on ‘100 Years’ are as deathly quiet and sombre as a distant church bell on a misty morning, and although Anderson is singing about something as big and important as the state of the world at the moment (‘How it shudders from its expanding’), the effect is serene, yet deeply haunting.

Returning to the idea that this is an album that’s ‘about things’, I’m relieve to say that for all the stumbles that EMA seems to be making in creating an album with a whole lot more ambition than her previous effort, mostly concentrated in the more anthemic offerings, there’s plenty of good shit here, and Anderson’s talent for interesting sounds and lyrics hasn’t diminished since people started learning her name. ‘Solace’ is an absolute triumph, for instance, soaring and cathartic in a way that the grander songs on the album never manage, pulling your ears to attention with a catchy chorus, a bubbling synth hook and its madcap percussive debris. The album ends with its most evidently ‘of the times’ effort – ‘Dead Celebrity’, which could’ve been a whole lot more trite if it wasn’t for its bastardised riff on the Last Post, its climactic fireworks display and lyrics like ‘we wanted something timeless in a world so full of speed’ – all awesome. Songs that reference the controversial selfie and clicking on links might still be hard to get used to as the Internet envelops our lives more and more, and as far as trying to make a topical statement on this generation of avatars and statuses goes, EMA hasn’t quite cemented a totally coherent point anywhere here, but her songs are still as excitingly bold as ever, and her style and lyrics as simple yet affecting as in her masterful debut. It’s not as good as Past Life Martyred Saints, but maybe nothing will be.

EMA - Satellites

St. Vincent - St. Vincent

A track title like ‘Birth in Reverse’ doesn’t create the most appealing mental image, but such is the surreal wonderland of Annie Clark’s imagination, where darkness hums beneath a colourful lustre of charming and cheerful eccentricity. Historically, St. Vincent’s sound played like a neurotic Disney soundtrack; beautiful and stargazy, even angelic, but harbouring a real edge, like a razorblade buried in a bowl of sherbert. In the five years since then her confidence has an artist has skyrocketed, and she continues with the magical strangeness of her unique musical personality, only this time with a heightened sense of awareness and self-assurance. While her previous albums always had a youthful shyness about them, the St. Vincent we have with us here today is her same recognisably oddball self, but the coyness present on her previous releases has vanished. It’s all there on the album cover – staring confidently out at you from her throne, with her majestic gown and her snow-queen hairstyle. This is a self-titled album, after all, and all of this seems to indicate a bold new direction for gorgeously-minded superstar St. Vincent, and here, after four(ish) long years since she last haunted the minds of every hipster in the Western world, she's back with a pink, kitsch dreadnought of an album.

Upon immediate first listen, then, this album signals a change of course in Clark’s artistic trajectory beyond the classically wistful coffee-shop insecurity that we all fell in love with from the Marry Me era onwards, and instead seems to have moved definitively towards a new frontier of futuristic kitsch, a retrofuturistic combination of the 1980s, the 2010s, and god knows when and what else. After all, here in 2014, the world is in the throes of a particularly futuristic-looking and breakneck-fast transition into god knows what, and this album’s standard-bearer ‘Digital Witness’ is probably the most apparent instance of St. Vincent looking outward as opposed to inward, as the entire song sounds, at least from one interpretation, like a sarcastic diatribe about our newfound obsession with validating our own lives in the abstract world of social media: “If I can’t show it, you can’t see me, what’s the point of doing anything?” The spreading tendrils of the internet have been the cause of immense social and cultural upheaval amongst the human race for the past twenty years or so, but so far St. Vincent is the only musician I’ve heard who has managed to address this revolution directly and effectively, as if she’s not even trying. “Pleasure.loathing.huey.newton” she coos in the song where the late Black Panther is “entombed in a shrine of zeroes and ones” – and she’s right; he’s staring out at me from his Wikipedia page as we speak.

I’ve never given her much credit for this before, but Annie Clark is an incredibly nuanced lyricist as well as a musical prodigy. There’s a lot being said in her metaphor-laden verses and choruses that I dread to think has gone unnoticed by my own self, but the depth of lines such as “a smile is more than showing teeth” and the syllabic revelry of lines like “summer is as faded as a lone cicada call” reveal a St. Vincent as dextrous in the brain as in her guitar-slaying fingers. Her collaborator and friend, New Wave Grand Duke David Byrne, says that “despite having toured with her for almost a year, I don’t think I know her much better, at least on a personal level”, so as a mere musical civilian I expect that trying to find a path via this album into the machinations of Annie Clark herself and all of her possibly intended meanings may end up proving fruitless, but imagery like “headless heroes heaped by the pylons as a careless sun sets on the West” is semantic dynamite, and this album is as lyrically dense and ferocious as Strange Mercy, if not impressively superior. The world that these songs inhabit is bright, colourful, and uncannily strange in its representation of the modern life of its creator.

Annie Clark’s always been talented, there’s never been any doubt about that, but it’s instantly apparent that on the musical side of her fourth album, she’s upped her own creative ante. Her Renaissance-woman arsenal of abilities is sharpened to divine levels; this album is an absolute wealth of sounds, instruments, moods and movements, all arranged, performed and produced tightly and with a clear embrace of the buzzing-metal-and-plastic sound she’s built out of the synthesiser love carried over from the last album. ‘Bring Me Your Loves’ is a stomper; the sound of St. Vincent thrashing around a chaotic chamber of whirrs, crackles and hisses, sounding as far removed from her human side as she’s dared to stray yet. ‘I Prefer Your Love’ is a stopping-point halfway through the album, a break from the laser-light synths and roaring guitars, it’s a ballad dedicated to her mum where she tells her “all the good in me is because of you” (how bloody sweet is that, aw); soft and shimmering and lovely in contrast to the track formerly mentioned. ‘Birth in Reverse’ is noisy and shrill but somehow St. Vincent has this ability to find beautiful melody in the sharpest and strangest artificial sounds, tied together with her voice that is part desperation, part confidence, part siren. The mythological kind.

With this album, St. Vincent has gone nuclear. Marry Me and Actor were sparkling drops of acid wistfulness, Strange Mercy was sadder, sharper and better, and while I’m not saying that this newest effort is definitively better than Strange Mercy in any way, shape or form, it has a clarity in its construction – the observant internet-age futurism, the blending of usual art-indie songwriting with weirder sounds and elements, the swift and effortless transitions between notably different but consistently vibrant moods. You can tell that this is an album that’s going to cement St. Vincent’s place in the pantheon of this slice of history’s acclaimed musicians. She’s ferociously gifted, in weaving her music, in sculpting her own image, in making songs from the (don’t vomit) ‘art-rock’ side of the playing field that can be beautiful, ferocious, uplifting, tense, abrasive, soft and electrifying all at once; exciting to witness, and so uniquely St. Vincent. I’d be surprised if there was an ear on the planet who didn’t find something joyous to step to in this LP, which has proven that if you’re searching for a modern-day musical idol to venerate, you could do a fucktonne of a lot worse than Annie Clark.

St. Vincent - Digital Witness

Xiu Xiu - Angel Guts: Red Classroom

Xiu Xiu are a bizarrely eccentric little enclave of a band, and as such they are an entity which can only cater exclusively to a certain type – and I don’t mean that in some sort of exclusively superior hipster-generation sort of way, mainly because the ‘certain type’ of crowd who get the greatest genuine thrill out of Xiu Xiu are probably not the kind of people who anyone would want to be, and it most certainly isn’t the sort of music to impress your friends with. I’m sure that you can figure out within seconds of listening whether Jamie Stewart and company’s sometimes mystifyingly nutty blend of nightmarish soul-stripping and unapologetically avant-garde weirdness is right up your dark, dingy alley or not. I’ve always been a tremendous admirer of Xiu Xiu, both for their wacky experimentation that makes every album salted with novelty and for Stewart’s ability to create works of absolute harrowing genius; frequently disturbing, sometimes startlingly bleak.

Saying that, however, despite Xiu Xiu having produced some of the most gut-wrenchingly sad and suffocatingly desperate music I’ve ever heard, it isn’t all darkness, they’ve always had a playful side, even if it is a mental one. How else would you explain track titles like ‘I Luv Abortion’ and videos like this one? In recent releases they’ve even sounded fairly, well, jovial (at least musically if not lyrically), as with ‘Chocolate Makes You Happy’ and ‘I Do What I Want, When I Want’. But on this latest release, all those possible instances of not-necessarily-suicidal music have been totally extinguished from consideration. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is the most overtly grim Xiu Xiu album in years. Every track is a lights-off, reverberated, doom-laden sadness exercise. This isn’t a collection of songs to be enjoyed so much as to be endured, decorating their strange and experimental soundscape with impassioned screaming, rumbling bassy synths, chopped vocals, ear-splitting electronic dissonance and squealing pig samples. Make no mistake, this is pure serial-killer territory, and the focus isn’t so much on the sad side of things as on creating a genuinely disturbing, viscerally haunting, terrifying experience, which has always been a common characteristic of Xiu Xiu, but here that beloved element is bolstered to a thousand degrees.

Sounds good, right? I mean, I love dark music, as do a lot of people, and in the past Xiu Xiu have gifted me with music darker and more uniquely fucked-up than much else I could think of. However, just because something’s pushing itself as far down the well of darkness as it can reach, it doesn’t necessarily produce stellar results, and to be frank, Angel Guts: Red Classroom, while it did leave me adequately disturbed, it also left me - spoiler alert - ultimately a little unimpressed. It’s not that the crew aren’t trying or aren’t putting as much creativity into their zero-rules method of experimental song-crafting; by all means, there’s still plenty of successful bouts of madness. ‘Stupid in the Dark’ is probably the one song most resembling an actual song, though it doesn’t lose any of its raw appeal by any means, and as a result it’s one of my favourites – it’s hard not to love the gothic hum of the synthesisers. Meanwhile ‘Adult Friends’ has some joyously fucked-up psychosexual issues (The line where touching breasts ‘is like a lobster crawling over my arm’ is delivered so straight that it works), and ‘El Naco’ is frightening to the point of nausea, leading me to believe that whether or not you take pleasure in listening to this sort of thing probably says a lot about you as a person (It probably says plenty about me). There’s nothing here that reaches the perfection of classic songs like, say, ‘Apistat Commander’ (although that is a difficult one to beat for sheer suicidal brilliance), but fans of horrific sounds will be treated and then some.

In terms of Xiu Xiu’s more quotation-marks ‘artistic’ dalliances, my feelings on this facet of the band’s avant-garde sensibilities are just as ambivalent as ever. A band called Joy Division created similarly dark, cuttingly sad music, but did so with an air of absolute dignity. Xiu Xiu spit out dignity. Part of the joy of listening to Xiu Xiu as a group who express dark feelings (to put it mildly) is that Jamie Stewart and his transient entourage have never held back and have never reined it in – their music is bold and it’s ridiculous and it’s so melodramatic that it almost seems perfectly pitched, and all this is why they manage to reach naked depths of the human soul inconceivable to other bands. This is also their biggest problem, of course, as to anyone who isn’t all that into it, the bewildering artiness that comes with this mentality probably looks like that episode of Spaced, and even to a fan like me, it can get tiresome to have your otherwise beautifully despondent piece of heart-skewering spoiled by the occasional lyric that just pushes it too far for you to go along with it. Here, the lyrics are so overshadowed by the screaming presence of the music that it’s not such a gigantic problem, but in a sense it’s gone the other direction – now the music is so batshit insane that it’s more pulverising than satisfying, though I guess Xiu Xiu have made no pretences of being easy listening.

This album’s undoubtedly another treasure trove for Xiu Xiu fans more dedicated than I am, but for me it’s hard work, and for light listeners it’s probably way too much. ‘The Silver Platter’, for instance, is like watching Suspiria in the dark, on acid, whilst being gently molested. Angel Guts: Red Classroom is guaranteed to be a difficult listen, and not just in the ‘how-much-can-you-handle’ sort of way. There are just a few lulls in its aggravated despair, particularly the moody but almost quaintly beautiful ‘Bitter Melon’, and although I can heartily commend its invention and the sheer breadth of its fuck-it-let’s-just-do-it horror, it’s patchy and it’s a little tiring and all its terrifying elements would probably sound a lot more powerful if there was a little more variation from its unremitting atrocity-diving. Whether you respond to ‘Black Dick’ with unimpressed laughter or paranoid horror is a good litmus test for whether this stuff’s for you. If you’re looking for something upsetting, then by all means, you’re in luck, but even though it’s arguably Xiu Xiu’s darkest and most psychotic album yet - which really is saying something – I can’t help but feel that it’s not one of their greatest.

Xiu Xiu - Stupid in the Dark