In Past Life Martyred Saints, EMA Was Lost In A Pit Of Despair. She Made It Out
The 2011 industrial drone folk album by Erica M. Anderson was a vivid document of self doubt, and what comes after
Tristan Young @talltristan
The fabled journey from one’s humble home town to California in aspirations of finding oneself or earning that big break are nearly as old as the state’s place in pop culture relevance. We’ve seen it depicted in literature, film, and myriad records of unimpeachable to questionable competency. These tails span the tonal spectrum from tongue and cheek to truly harrowing; it’s a broad template in which to graft an endless array of personal biases and thematics. Odds are, however, you haven’t been subject to a rendition of this tale as debilitating, traumatizing, and downright intense as the veritable folk horror opera that is Past Life Martyred Saints by Erica M. Anderson, or EMA. Hers is a story where heartbreak, the dissolution of ones romantic and professional dreams, and a widening pit of nihilistic despair are just the start. It’s an experience where baroque and violent considerations towards suicide are mere prologue. It’s an album that plunges so deep into the depths of malignant psychosomatic exploration and straight up physical self-harm that the prospect of a happy ending seems demoralizingly out of reach. For Anderson is in a hole, and for the majority of PLMS, she can only go deeper before eventually crawling out.
Anderson’s earlier years are perhaps emblematic of post “Americana” Americana. Born into a rural community in South Dakota, she lived in an environment that never truly felt like home. “What’s it like to be small town in gay?”, she asks rhetorically in California. The seeds of a desire to escape are all over the industrial drone folk freak out The Grey Ship. Over rusted and serrated acoustic scrapes she calmly asserts that one way or another she is leaving this place. “When the grey ship comes it is coming fro me, when the grey ship comes I am leaving today”. Hints of antiquated lullaby structures in terms of instrumental melody and how she purposes her at times reassuring and maternal voice seed the foreground, however an ominous tone poisons the whole affair. The scorched-earth chords from her six string, the desensitized nature of her unnervingly level delivery. This place has drained her of all meaning and intent. Her vocals are beyond monotone, they are zombified; death looms.
It’s towards the end of the song that the she ponders the notion of not leaving, and the attendant fear that infects her voice begins to manifest. As more elegant strings swell with anxiety, she considers joining her dearly departed family. “I hear all them calling, the pearly gates, we’ve all gone together, we all go to sleep”. Her voice, formally comprised of deadpan nonchalance, quivers and degrades under the weight of palpable terror, convinced that something truly terrifying is just on the cusp of happening. Then it does, the guitars and percussion transform into sheer artillery, a rapid fire assault on the senses akin to some kind of sonic violation. The Grey Ship is incensed by the very notion it has to exist. By the time it calms down, Anderson is reduced to a shell of person, muttering anecdotes that speak to how hollowed out and emptied she has become; “great grandma lived on a prairie and nothing, and nothing, and nothing. I’ve got that feeling inside of me, and nothing”
That’s the beginning.
The Grey Ship’s asynchronous mood swings set the tone for the album. A concerning detachment that segues into alarming sympathy, that erupts into unmitigated rage. Sure enough, Anderson did make it out of South Dakota. After cutting her teeth in an experimental punk outfit Amps For Christ in the early 2000s she started up a band called GOWNS and went of in search of opportunity. GOWNS was headed up by Anderson and Ezra Buchla, who was also her lover. Their music was almost obnoxiously grim and dour. Regardless of its compositional or artistic merits, it seemed no one really enjoyed it. Anderson’s relationship both professional and personal was besieged by a multitude of abuse. The band and the relationship fell apart. When asked to recount her time with Buchla, all Anderson could muster was, “we were young, we were crazy, and we were in love. Or maybe we weren’t in love?” So there was Anderson, left alone and aimless in a place she didn’t fully understand. Consumed by regret, despair and loathing, she fell into a downward spiral of self harm, a cynical rejection of any notion of healing, and heart rending pleas for help. It’s a volatile cocktail.
PLMS expresses the ways that mental trauma can manifest as physical harm. As such it is a physically uncomfortable album. A lot of bodily mutilation or dysmorphia peppers her lyrics. She recalls, “20 kisses from a butterfly knife” in the eponymous track- “I have bled all my blood out” in California she laments; “my arms are see through plastic, they are glass” in the soul sucking, yet some how still gorgeous Marked. During Red Star she casually recalls of past relationships, “enough flesh wounds to make a kill”. The album carries these conceptual elements into the lyrical and instrumental relationships that makeup the songs. It comes to light in the raw stripped down intimacy of Marked and California when she is at her most vulnerable. Anteroom sees Anderson, briefly undergoing some kind of stress induced psychosis, croon in the mold of a placid, albeit disturbing, folk horror. The triumphant upheaval at the end of Red Star is articulated as much through as its confident crescendos as her lyrical epiphanies. The damaged and complex state of being Anderson finds herself in seems disqualifyingly difficult to articulate, yet PLMS does so in convincing ways both simple and ornate.
Anderson reacts to her state of mental and physical disrepair in a number of ways. One, to be expected, is a confluence of regret, cynicism, nihilism, detachment, and even derangement at its most extremes. The asymmetrical outcroppings of noise guitar as she slides through a litany of spoken word grievances in California is a big middle finger to a reality of systemic and personal issues that she can’t control. “Fuck California, you made me boring”, she crows, coming to understand only too late the sea of superficial personalities washing away her own uniqueness. She begs for forgiveness for her life choices in some truly riveting pleas, “I’m sorry Steven and Andrew that I ever left you, you’ve never seen the ocean, never been on a plane”. In Marked she is a mere shadow of herself, mustering all the strength she has just for her corroded vocals to register.
Butterfly Knife, by far the most sinister track of the bunch, sees her in a séance like mode of recovered memory recalling her youth in high school as a class mate- possibly herself actually- experimented with self mutilation. “You were the goth in high school, you cut and fucked your arms up, you always talked about it, they thought you’d never do it, but I knew, I knew, I knew”. That last part sounds more like a prophetic warning that a troubled recollection, a mere taste of what she is capable of. The instrumental through line that sherpas these thoughts is remarkable. It opens with crass sonic distortion, and ushers her ghostly vocals just underneath, almost like she is insurgently sneaking in. Despite her vicious tenor she sounds distant. Screaming at the top her lungs, but 20 feet from the mike; a maelstrom of pain and anguish, but not obviously observable for anyone else. The centrality of such a metaphor should not be lost.
For all of the sonic and lyrical dread of the album, what’s most arresting is how overtly sweet it can be- that more than anything is what lingers long after its run time. The moments where Anderson peels back her calcified husk of disaffected protection to reveal a damaged person, desperately in need of help, and even at times willing to put her self on the line to help others is a transitional accomplishment in terms of tone and output. After the insidious creepiness of Anteroom segues into a wicked Sonic Youth guitar solo (there are many references to Kim Gordon that are readily available when discussing EMA), the track transforms into a heart warming folk lullaby. Anderson softly whispers, nestled amongst glowing strings, “If this time through, we don’t get it right, I’ll come back to you in another life”. While the beginnings of Marked are akin to some one literally disintegrating before you like a person stricken with acute radiation burns (welcome to Hollywood), she miraculously builds her strength, along with a rousing folk melody, into a stunningly reassuring person. As if she’s spent long enough in a pit of despair and is finally willing to crawl out, she’ll even help take you with her. Breakfast should be played to sick patients in a children’s hospital, it’s that reassuring.
Special attention needs to be paid to the astoundingly gorgeous Coda. Completely devoid of instruments, Coda is a strikingly desynchronized a cappella. Featuring Anderson and an unnamed male vocalist, the two are never quite on the same page in terms of timing, but their sentiments are monolithic in intensity and affection. Anderson sings with a velvety grace, while the male backtracking is scattered, stressed, acutely disharmonized. Their interplay is staggeringly beautiful as one always trails or cant quite match the other. The lyrical centerpiece of the album tersely rendered and feverishly howled by the two- “I wish I had another hole to get out of, these drugs are making me feel so bad, I can’t stop wanting to take them”. That cycle of repetitious abuse and despair with no clear way out is heart breaking, and articulated with unflinching bravery and certitude here. Nearly 10 years later it sends shivers down your spine with each subsequent listen.
PLMS doesn’t owe you a happy ending any more than life owes Anderson one. Yet its concluding track Red Star wants to at least advocate the audacity of hope. Considering how tumultuous this album is, Red Star starts off oddly calming. Simple rustic blues chords build the song; yet seem out of place in comparison to the rest of the album. They appear to be alluding to the rural simplicity of her long lost home in South Dakota. She now understands the value of a place like that, having been separated from it for so long. It eventually evolves into the noise grunge that she more commonly trades in, but its more confident in its calmness this time; it’s something she is firmly in control of. This is in stark contrast to the sonic terror of Butterfly knife, the abstract wild of California, or the violent outburst of The Grey Ship. She’s not exactly better, and she’s certainly not fixed, as if such a subjectively judgemental term was even appropriate. But she can see a way out. She’s crawling out, and wrestling back control from the ambiguities of failure and self-loathing that have come to define her. As she leaves the depths of her former despair behind she offers one parting message to everything and everyone that dropped her down there- “if you won’t love me, someone will”.
Anderson lives in Oregon now. Perhaps a happy medium between the rural solitude of South Dakota and the over stimulated moral erosions of California. Which is of course not to intimate that all Anderson ever needed in life was a little balance. No one ever truly knows what he or she needs or where to find it. The more Anderson looked and failed, the more she fell down that hole. Once you’re down there, there’s really no assurance, or even assumption of getting out. All we may be left with are degraded vocals, serrated guitar strings, and droning blends of fear and paralyses. There’s certainly no guarantee that the considerable risk of bearing ones soul in the most exposed and unguarded manners possible can amend things. But that’s what Anderson did, and she found a path out. It wasn’t through therapy or a bunch of social media friendly step-by-step remedies. It’ wasn’t through transforming her character, but understanding what that character was in the first place that was fundamental. The clues to her catharsis are laid out early in the album, when she addresses a long lost friend, “fuck it baby, I know you’ll never change”.