Hardcore for Nerds

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EMA - ‘Mouth Like The Sun’ (Red Star) from Little Sketches on Tape (2010)

I figured this would be the best way to finish off PLMS, with this tape-recorded, acoustic version of Past Life Martyred Saints’ final track. I don’t really have much to say about either ‘Breakfast’ or ‘Butterfly Knife’ - good songs as they certainly are, to me they largely repeat the pattern of ‘Anteroom’ and ‘Milkman’: a slowcore ballad and a camp rocker. And yes, that last part applies to ‘Butterfly Knife’ too - come on, it’s practically operatic - even in her own words, as from this interview:

“Do you think it’s accurate to describe that album as “dark,” the way a lot of people are doing?

I don’t know…there’s also a sense of humor in the record that I think people don’t get or a sense of over-drama or tongue-in-cheek-ness that I think gets lost on people. Like in a song like “Butterfly Knife,” there’s an element of camp there that I think people don’t get.”

There’s also this excellent stripped-back recording for Pitchfork TV which makes it in to something quite different from what’s on the album; conversely, I don’t know what’s out there about ‘Breakfast’, nor do I have a clue what it might be about, but I do know that in its simplicity - “you feel just like a breeze to me” - it is perhaps one of the most beautiful songs on the album.

‘Red Star’ is an epic closer: if not by the standards of the 17-minute ‘Kind Heart’, which is possibly the very best EMA song of all despite being a cover and not on the album; but significantly more spaced-out - figuratively and literally - than the rest of the record’s nine tracks. I wrote about it at length before, in what was my most serious attempt to untangle the genealogy of the EMA sound and extract some sort of lasting meaning from her lyrics. This earlier version omits the explication - “Got a strange fascination/I been holding on the one/For that straight revelation/I been holding on for too long” - in favour of the imagery - eyes of green, mouth like the sun, red star, a bruised scar - and a final line that is too garbled and twisted for me to make out. The two tracks sound almost nothing alike - lo-fi and hi-fi, one abruptly stopping and starting with mechanical roughness, the other gently layering together a structure of tone and melody, and where one runs into the ground the other soars into the ether - yet they are recognisably one and the same.

EMA PLMS

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EMA - ‘Marked’

So I’ve got my ticket for EMA’s show in London next month, haven’t figured out quite how I’m getting or how long I’ll spend. It’s the first time I’ve bought tickets for a mainland UK show when an artist’s European tour doesn’t include Ireland (which happens frequently enough, since we’re only 4m people on our own island) but of all the current artists to do it for, EMA would have to be the one.

In recognition of that fact, I’m going to try to bring my attempt to write about each song on Past Life Martyred Saints in order, under the ‘PLMS’ tag, to a close. I was stymied by figuring out what to say about the best and most powerful song of them all, ‘Marked’. Musically and lyrically - or at least in the combination of the two, since they’re so entwined in their striking abrasiveness that they would look rather lost if considered in isolation - it has to be one for the ages, a song that will endure as a sound of the ’10s when the album and the year have receded into memories past. I really like the Gowns version, too, especially for its subtle differences - and the live version above, likewise, sounds quite different, beginning with actual guitar rather than the guttural scraping of the recorded version (which always hits like a gut-punch) and incorporates some of the extra lyrics from ‘Coda’ (“I looked on the computer and it just was an emptiness…”) - but returning to the track on her own LP is always like falling in love again with its immaculate production. Which is exemplary of the whole album, of course, a noted mixture of high and low fidelity, at least in aesthetic technique, and a folk-influenced sense of under-production which nevertheless produces a beautifully balanced and vibrant record which holds its own with any of its post-loudness-wars contemporaries, at least that I’ve heard.

No, it’s a beautiful song. But what to say about it? When confronted with lyrics like “I know I wish sometimes so I could just explain things/I wish that every time he touched me left a mark” I don’t even know how to explain it to myself - although I know it means a lot to me every time I hear it - let alone to anyone else, so all I could do was pair it with some existential philosophy. Twice. However, I discovered today that EMA has a similar problem herself, as recounted in this Quietus interview published in early June:

What about ‘Marked?’

EMA: That’s a tricky one to figure out to succinctly explain.

Because it’s hard to talk about?

EMA: It’s just that… I’m still trying to figure it out for myself, really. It’s actually very old, and was written in one take. And I won’t comment on my sobriety at the time, but there was no planning or notebook or anything; the take you hear on the record is the take of it being written. People really connect to that song. It’s been around for a while, and people ask me ‘When is ‘Marked’ coming out’? So I’ve been thinking about the day when I’m going to have to explain what this song is about. The one thing I will say about it is that I don’t want it to be a romanticised look at domestic violence. There are lots of forms of violence, I think, and not all of them leave marks.

Well, one of the things I got from the song was that it’s not necessarily literal - that some things don’t have to be physically violent to hurt, and they can leave something deeper than a physical mark.

EMA: Yeah, definitely. I definitely don’t want it to be taken at a face value that’s the same as, you know, ‘He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)’.

And yeah, one of the things I said about the “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark” line that gives the song its title and its sharpest edge is that it’s “both unavoidably abusive in its overtones and, it often seems to me, surprisingly and profoundly romantic”. Not that I’m in any way pro- the romanticisation of abuse, because that’s not what I meant. It reads as being about abuse and domestic violence on one level - also the description of arms as “see through plastic” and “a secret, bloodless, skinless mass” which I read described today as hinting “at body mortification”, but could be pointing to the invisibility of marks - and, like I said, unavoidable in its horror. However, in a completely different and seemingly contradictory way I also hear it as wishing for intimacy and connection - that emotional meanings could leave behind a physical impression - in a way that’s intense and ‘romantic’ if not unequivocally positive. Together they form a sort of uncomfortable duality in my mind, but the two things - hurt and love - are inescapably connected if one risks the other or if repairing one requires the confrontation of the other; it may just be, without romanticising or justifying anything, that since both light and dark have to exist in the world, we all have to find ways of expression and understanding that transcends that aching, practically schizophrenic division.

EMA PLMS emo

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“ I know I wish sometimes so I could just explain things
I wish that every time he touched me left a mark

—

EMA - ‘Marked’

“Sade was executed in effigy; he, too, only killed in his imagination. Prometheus ends his days as Onan.”

Albert Camus, The Rebel

What’s most right about Mark Richardson’s Resonant Frequency column about this song and EMA is how he’s only half right when he says “one of the things that’s most fun about writing about music is figuring it out and trying to render those elusive feelings into words to see if anyone else might understand what you mean”. And it’s not because the striking line above is both unavoidably abusive in its overtones and, it often seems to me, surprisingly and profoundly romantic. It’s that such understanding, or communication, or reconciliation, is always, in the final analysis, destined to be elusive; the physical can never be entirely encoded in the mental or spiritual, if only because both are imperfect realities (or approximations thereof.)

EMA PLMS camus

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Vinyl Sunday, ‘Marked’, (Trepanation)

previously

EMA PLMS

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“ They say love turns to rot but I’m gonna give him all I got;
My arms they are a see through plastic
My arms are a secret bloodless, skinless mass

—

EMA - Coda, Marked

“Intelligence in chains loses in lucidity what it gains in intensity. The only logic known to Sade was the logic of his feelings. He did not create a philosophy, he pursued a monstrous dream of revenge.”

Albert Camus, The Rebel

EMA PLMS camus

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$still from EMA - ‘Milkman’ video by Steve Rahilly dumb dumb, my lips are numb These opening lines might suggest voicelessness; except that the song isn’t shy about shouting out what’s on its mind. The next couplet, “my tongue is blazing, my tongue is plumb” is vibrant and flushed with colour - that last word, while it sounds like ‘plum’ as in the reddish-purple fruit, is written down in the lyrics as ‘plumb’: which, while suggestive of heaviness and roundness, is also an adjective meaning exact, true (from the lead plumb-line, naturally). This is also a song that makes you sit up and ask ‘is that what those lyrics are about?’. To wit, the title ‘Milkman’, and “need you come inside/I’m gaspin’”, “comes at morning/he comes in the dawn”… need I go on? Well, no, on one level it’s a description of the faithful services of an everyday dairy product purveyor. And on another it’s a depiction of the male sexual being, at least in one common aspect of him, in the emission of seminal fluid. Whatever else surrounds it, it forms a fairly unavoidable (that is, if you subscribe to the possible interpretation) central image, a focus for the wider tableau of sexually charged cinematics. “He can see through all you charms”, “I can see right through” looks forward to the transparent bodies of ‘Marked’; “Eyes can see you/barefoot on the lawn” is similarly physical, sensual and tactile - “eyes of green” are another central image in the album’s final song. In this perspective is inverted the traditional rock’n’roll perspective: man, looking at woman. Nor, although she audibly participates, is it necessarily centred inward, on the individual, female - feminist? - experience. Instead, the male gaze is truly reversed, the objectification reclaimed and transcended. Broken. Destroyed: “He’s the milkman He knows what you do Gives it to you But I can see right through” Which might explain why the song sounds so fractured, so brash and ugly - a mix of Lungfish-like elliptical drone and electroclash, smash-happy percussion. But goddamnit, under all the hissing and squealing - and gasping - doesn’t it still sound beautiful?$

still from EMA - ‘Milkman’ video by Steve Rahilly

dumb dumb, my lips are numb

These opening lines might suggest voicelessness; except that the song isn’t shy about shouting out what’s on its mind. The next couplet, “my tongue is blazing, my tongue is plumb” is vibrant and flushed with colour - that last word, while it sounds like ‘plum’ as in the reddish-purple fruit, is written down in the lyrics as ‘plumb’: which, while suggestive of heaviness and roundness, is also an adjective meaning exact, true (from the lead plumb-line, naturally).

This is also a song that makes you sit up and ask ‘is that what those lyrics are about?’. To wit, the title ‘Milkman’, and “need you come inside/I’m gaspin’”, “comes at morning/he comes in the dawn”… need I go on? Well, no, on one level it’s a description of the faithful services of an everyday dairy product purveyor. And on another it’s a depiction of the male sexual being, at least in one common aspect of him, in the emission of seminal fluid. Whatever else surrounds it, it forms a fairly unavoidable (that is, if you subscribe to the possible interpretation) central image, a focus for the wider tableau of sexually charged cinematics. “He can see through all you charms”, “I can see right through” looks forward to the transparent bodies of ‘Marked’; “Eyes can see you/barefoot on the lawn” is similarly physical, sensual and tactile - “eyes of green” are another central image in the album’s final song.

In this perspective is inverted the traditional rock’n’roll perspective: man, looking at woman. Nor, although she audibly participates, is it necessarily centred inward, on the individual, female - feminist? - experience. Instead, the male gaze is truly reversed, the objectification reclaimed and transcended. Broken. Destroyed:

“He’s the milkman

He knows what you do

Gives it to you

But I can see right through”

Which might explain why the song sounds so fractured, so brash and ugly - a mix of Lungfish-like elliptical drone and electroclash, smash-happy percussion. But goddamnit, under all the hissing and squealing - and gasping - doesn’t it still sound beautiful?

EMA PLMS

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Codeine - ‘Wird’ from The White Birch (Sub Pop, 1994)

(w/ gtr by David Grubbs)

I am in the room, I am in the anteroom

So, your comparison for today is ‘slowcore’. Although neither this song nor ‘Anteroom’ are close to being typical examples - ‘Wird’ because it’s essentially a Slint song (albeit phrased rather differently, the same story told in a different instrumental ‘voice’), ‘Anteroom’ because it’s so full of melody, harmony, all those song-y things that are usually stripped away, or back, in a true slowcore song. Nevertheless, ‘Anteroom’ has that minimalist feel of the genre, where every guitar chord - the opening calling back to the sublimated folk of ‘California’ - both echoes in empty space and fills it up with a resonant beauty. ‘Wird’ is far starker, but its deconstructed tones nevertheless manage to convey the feel of a tune, its inner structure: which is what slowcore is all about.

“I can sense the ghost in the machine” is about finding the spiritual in the technical, the animating force in the material flesh. It’s also, variously, an illustration of the absurdity of Cartesian dualism, a popular ‘science’ book by Arthur Koestler, the title of a 1981 album by The Police, and the inspiration for the Japanese manga Ghost in the Shell. But here it carries a slippery irony, because it seems to promise hope “No one has to shriek/No one has to worry now” yet does so in a way that immediately suggests a reality that is the opposite. The personal ghost is maybe the key we wish we had to the world; but we can never be sure we have it, we’re never quite there.

“Who built

Who built this machine?

This mechanism

This misery”

Codeine, ‘Wird’

Codeine’s The White Birch seemed to me to be the worst possible album to listen to it in a bad mood, because its opening bars are so dull and leaden, and continue that way through most of the songs, that they just increase the feeling of numbness and separation: but now I’ve figured out that you just need to stick it out until the really heavy guitars come in, crushing everything before them in a crunchy mass of distortion - too one-directional and unvarying to be truly cathartic, but giving a momentary glimpse of that feeling of life, of pure animation; that ghost. And around that, exquisite emptiness - it turns out that the hammer blows are not just part of the machine, they’re its spirit too.

At this point in Past Life Martyred Saints, we’re already familiar with EMA’s vocal and song-writing style: I kind of feel like ‘California’ is the real first track, with ‘The Grey Ship’ has more of an extended prologue, which makes ‘Anteroom’ the introduction to the rest of the album. What that means is that the difference in style - foreshadowing ‘Coda’ and ‘Marked’ in its spacious intensity - can’t hide much, we still can predict the trajectory and the rhythm of the song as she sings it. In a certain embellished-slowcore fashion, there’s a gentle rise and fall of guitar and voice for the first third, before the drums kick in with quite a pronounced effect: again, very slowcore. Then the guitar builds up to an almost hummable crescendo, before dropping out to leave four solitary piano notes; then the voice comes back in, once, then double, and a while later, drums again: everything falls apart and then comes back together again - “If this time through we don’t get it right, I’ll come back to you in another life”.

slowcore codeine EMA PLMS

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EMA - ‘Capriciana’ from Little Sketches on Tape (cassette, 2010)

Fuck California/Oh, California

This is where I should maybe talk about ‘California’ as a text, but it’s too dense, too complex. There’s sexuality, carnality, physicality (“I bled all my blood out but these red pants they don’t show that”), collisions between mind and word (“Schizophrenia rules the brain”); thanks to Handsome Young Stranger for her overview and noting that “so fucked it’s 5150” refers to involuntary confinement for mental illness in California, like being “sectioned” in the UK. And here the cultural references are split between the West Coast and the Mid West of the US; the original Pitchfork track review picked up on the intergenerational and intertextual borrowing of Bo Diddley’s line “I’m just 22, and I don’t mind dying”.

What I want to talk about instead is the form of ‘California’, one that is prefigured by the recording above and others like it. It’s a combination of language and mechanics; in semi-practical terms, a deconstructed folk song made with a voice-activated tape recorder. As she explains on her web page for these songs*, this fact meant that (as a measure of economy) the tape would slow down in the absence of sound and speed up with its reappearance, creating an intriguing acoustic effect. But crucially, something at least stylistically similar I think happens in ‘California’, with its mixture of drone and spoken-word: although the underlying rhythm seems solidly fixed throughout, the tempo of speech varies: “favourite… pastlifemartyred saint”. And in its use of demotic and personal language, it’s very much like a folk song too.

* available there are ‘Mouth Like The Sun’, an early - and predictably warped - rendering of ‘Red Star’, and ‘Boiled in Lead’, a sinister instrumental piece, reminiscent of David Pajo’s covers of the Misfits; but possibly the best track in the collection - shh, Google it! - is the following track to this first opener, ‘Hey Boy’, which is like an EMA equivalent of Leadbelly’s Nirvana-famous ‘Where Did You Sleep Last Night’, in that it’s also the closest in structure and content to a genuine blues-folk song: “Hey boy, are you gonna see another lady?”

EMA PLMS

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“ Blue sky is silver blue sky is grey
When the grey ship calls I am leaving
Today I thought it would come

—

EMA, ‘The Grey Ship’ from Past Life Martyred Saints

It just occurred to me that ‘Grey Ship’ is maybe, very obviously, about a bus? I don’t know if Greyhound buses in America are actually grey, but it works as metonymy, right?

I have this idea of writing about Past Life Martyred Saints as a single whole, as the album, rather than a partial (if dominant) extension of EMA, as the artist, with all those fascinating layers and distractions. A good way to begin, I guess, is with its narrative structure - so ‘Grey Ship’ as the leaving song and an introduction, or prologue, in South Dakota; followed by (Fuck) ‘California’, where the album picks up with a punchy single after having opened with a virtuoso piece that lasts the length of, and almost tricks you into thinking it is, two songs; and after the mid-way point of ‘Coda’, there’s the pre-cathartic ‘Marked’, and the closing chapter of ‘Red Star’.

EMA PLMS

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