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.
Who's the artist for the painting?
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