(Souterrain Transmissions/Spunk)

Ex-Gowns frontwoman delivers excellent noise-folk début

2011 has been a vintage year for stunning solo projects from weird goth girls: Zola Jesus has broken through to a mainstream audience, Austra has made an excellent début with Feel It Break, and Planningtorock has launched a career comeback on the DFA. Maybe there’s something in the water, because EMA – that’s short for Erika M. Anderson, ex-member of combustible and frenetic collective Gowns – has crafted a solo début that is definitely fit to be counted amongst these high-calibre epigones of Kate Bush. But where Austra and Zola Jesus have an art-school kind of arch weirdness, EMA possesses a kind of small-town-outcast-driven-to-the-city persona, someone who is equally at home listening to Danzig (whom EMA has covered) as they are Einstürzende Neubauten. So despite the layers of gritty noise here, her songs possess an immediacy that the aforementioned artists don’t – the chorus to Marked is the kind of singalong thing you could find yourself humming until you realise that the words are “I wish that every time he touched left a mark.” The album’s weakness is its tendency to melodrama – as far as I can tell, Butterfly Knife is about teen suicide – but what would, in most artist’s hands, be over-egging the pudding is, in Anderson’s weird blend of folk, blues, and noise, just right. Past Life Martyred Saints is a rare glimpse into an intensely private world of pain and loss, but even if it’s hard to bear at times we should be thankful to Anderson for letting us in.

****

CHAD PARKHILL

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