"Satellites"
There are so many brilliant things about this track, I simply don't know where to begin. It's an unabashedly kitsch pop song, only without its glistening veneer. More like some rigid skeletal anatomy of a pop song, combining wonderfully tacky progressions with audacious, heavy grotesque sounds. Few have been able to pull this off with, I can only name Cabaret Voltaire, PiL or Suicide off the top of my head. She gets extra perks for triggering the same kind of harrow here as Faith No More's flappy fish-shtick (look, a terrible pun!) in their "Epic" video.
"So Blonde"
Such a clever tune, the point-and-laugh-at-the-mirror 90s throwback So Blonde. It seems Anderson jestingly revisits the whammy she documented in Past Life Martyred Saints, intervening her Midwestern roots with the punk rock fatalism she embraced with noise-misfits Gowns. Simply heart them golden Wildflowers-era Tom Pettyish vocal harmonies around the two-minute mark.
"3Jane"
Transcending, probably the most spotless tune I've heard so far this year, along with Chad VanGaalen's "Frozen Paradise". We find Anderson almost completely forfeiting some of her idiosyncracies as a producer, exposing her insides with her voice - which soars over the track's majestic lucid backdrops. Not sure if this is deliberate (I'm kind of guessing it is!), bearing in mind the song's visceral outcry for bequeathing a fractured online identity across the digital superhighways. You can feel the proneness in her voice...it's so incredibly heartfelt, yet forceful and empowering...it leaves me sobbing. Despite the song's forlorn makeup, those monumental keyboard layers (she even mixed in ye ol' dial-up tone) really evoke this sense of awe and bewilderment, the notion that our current technological headway might actually usurp the ersatz-futurism we scrutinized in timeless sci-fi novels and movies.
"Chtulu"
Just as the title implies, this is one gaudy abomination of a track, it blusters with pure epicness. In many ways, it's the same untethered scourge Kanye West displayed in that song Hold My Liquor. Lurking ominously with these oddly beautiful soundscapes, dallying violins, just lunging out from the surface with more and more impetus. Anderson really shines with her anguished vocals, her sheer ability is often underemphasized. Side note: I kind of wonder if "gable" refers to Bas Jan Ader's tumble-from-the-roof performance art piece she alluded to as she addressed her past in Gowns. It's one of the many things befuddling me whilst listening to this album. Which is, by default, kind of a great thing, isn't it?
"Smoulder"
Again, another absolutely fearless track. I was quite baffled that Pitchfork criticized Anderson for breaking the momentum of the first three tracks, arguably her three most palatable songs to date. "Smoulder" is basically EMA returning to the deviant ways that made people rapture about Past Life. It's a classic slow burner: I love the divergence to her heavily distorted dementia of her lead vocals, with her analgesic backing vocals serving as calmative. It really made me think about her struggle to forsake her maverick stage antics playing bigger, more professional venues. I for one, love that there are still artists that manage to unnerve and shake things up like Erika can. Just a haunting listen all the way through.
"Neuromancer"
An industrial-meets-reggaeton voodoo dance of death...and Erika is the conjuror, turning the tables on the disconnect she evokes in "3Jane". "Just keep going!", she exclaims after the first two bars of clinking clattering caliginous drums. Just an incessant four-and-a-half minutes of arcane doom chant splendor. Fucking amazing.
"When She Comes"
Like "Satellites", this song has an anthemic quality, only to be completely stripped from its zest and zeal. It's kind of got this languid, world weary feel, lulling into existential sulk. Even amidst its restraint, Anderson hushes all petty matters to bed with a single powerful line. "It's not too long we're in this world, so what'd you even come here for?"
"100 Years"
In this captivating sparse piano track, EMA staggers between dystopian angst and sense of bewilderment of our existence within the digital plane. Being 31 myself, I've contemplated it many times lately, since EMA is part of a generation of musicians in their thirties who can still reminisce the days when we paced our lives within the physical world, without crudely outlining and molding an effigy under the digital scope. Maybe this makes us more vulnerable, more prone to second guess it? After all, musicians in their early thirties generally resonate with a new generation of aficionado's. A lot of these kids I see on Generation Like look like they exchanged all that internet currency for happy pills…it's very inspiring to see two female artists in their 30s, EMA and Annie Clark (St. Vincent) heedlessly tackle this thorny subject matter. Whoa…digressing big time. Reel me back in!
"Solace"
Again, Anderson is driving me cuckoo by shrewdly alternating the words "solace" and "soulless"on her lyric sheet. But given that she eventually named this track "Solace" and its buoyant synth motif, I'd like to think she leans more towards the more optimistic side of the spectrum. Ambiguity never felt so maddening and blissful at the same time. AAAAARRRGGGH!
"Dead Celebrity"
I'm just going to do a major cop out here and quote this incredibly moving article by Roger Angell for the New Yorker (which I actually read inbetween research for my interview with Anderson this past February).
Excerpt:
"A weariness about death exists in me and in us all in another way, as well, though we scarcely notice it. We have become tireless voyeurs of death: he is on the morning news and the evening news and on the breaking, middle-of–the-day news as well—not the celebrity death, I mean, but the everyone-else death. A roadside-accident figure, covered with a sheet. A dead family, removed from a ramshackle faraway building pocked and torn by bullets. The transportation dead. The dead in floods and hurricanes and tsunamis, in numbers called “tolls.” The military dead, presented in silence on your home screen, looking youthful and well combed. The enemy war dead or rediscovered war dead, in higher figures. Appalling and dulling totals not just from this year’s war but from the ones before that, and the ones way back that some of us still around may have also attended. All the dead from wars and natural events and school shootings and street crimes and domestic crimes that each of us has once again escaped and felt terrible about and plans to go and leave wreaths or paper flowers at the site of. There’s never anything new about death, to be sure, except its improved publicity. At second hand, we have become death’s expert witnesses; we know more about death than morticians, feel as much at home with it as those poor bygone schlunks trying to survive a continent-ravaging, low-digit-century epidemic. Death sucks but, enh—click the channel."
Read the rest HERE. Please do.
Last but not least, with The Future's Void, EMA has been filling my void with each listen, just a bit by bit, day by day. I'm definitely going to catch her in Paradiso next Friday…hopefully, with this impetuous sequence of maunderings I have galvanized you, dear anonymous reader, to do the same. Getting there is after all, just a click away.
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