Hardcore for Nerds

EMA - Take One Two

“This one’s for all the weirdos out there: cherish your friends, fuck the haters and let your freak flag fly.”

EMA

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“ Past Life may have been cathartic to make, but it felt less like a personal statement and more like an acknowledgment of shared understanding. Anderson’s songs have blood and viscera and ache but they never feel like exhibitionism because we’ve felt these things, too. In “Red Star”, the narrator evokes the cosmos as a relationship disintegrates, and the song builds and builds until the “like a red star” refrain becomes “like a blue scar.” And then the album comes to an abrupt end. Blue scars are the ones that hurt, and the movement from infinite scale down into this small, private pain— the absurdity of that juxtaposition— is partly what gives Past Life its power.

—

Pitchfork: Top 50 Albums of 2011 - 13. EMA - Past Life Martyred Saints by Mark Richardson

Apropos of what I said yesterday, this is some really good writing - and thinking - about EMA. ‘Red Star’, which I wrote about at length originally here (and posted the early tape-recorded acoustic version here) contains two of my favourite sections from EMA’s lyrics:

“Got a strange fascination

I been holdin on the one

for that strange revelation

I been holdin on too long”

and

“…if you don’t love me

someone will”

which I think are a pretty profound illustration of the juxtaposition mentioned above. They’re practically Buddhist in their acceptance of worldly pain and suffering and the inability to grasp transcendence rather than simply being it.

EMA buddhism philosophy

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boatzone3:

wholeswerepunctured:

Native Nod - Tangled

Chris and Danny Leo, people.

I kinda think this maybe sounds like how I feel when I’m listening to EMA; and the lyrics read a little bit like how I think when I’m trying to figure out EMA - but for everyone who thinks EMA is super-confessional and honest; well this is what ‘emo’ actually was, before everything else. this probably wouldn’t survive a day if it was released now (unless it was obscured by screaming or tweed up as folk), which is ironic given that this dates from the decade of DFW’s need for a ‘New Sincerity’ - though obviously this was as niche then as now, or perhaps even more - which tbh I think has been hijacked for so much uncritical naivety. we’re so fucked up from capitalism, consumerism, internetism, and probably climate change (remember when environmentalism used to be so much simpler? no, I guess not) that we don’t need to hide from it, we need to embrace it and follow a new new sincerity, an ironised truthfulness, a fucking artistic way of life where everything is exactly as beautiful as it seems.

plus, you can’t have sincerity without solidarity and real sympathy, and maybe that’s what we lack.

‘today puberty, tomorrow the world’

90s EMA emo native nod irony

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“ said he was a fag but you know he was a pretty man
don’t you know they all look pretty to me?

—

EMA, ‘Anteroom’

h/t to philolzophy for the best definition of sexuality ever (and one I guess I subscribe to also): “kinda bi and straight”

EMA or 'heteroqueer' sex philosophy

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mothsinamoshpit asked: I feel a huge sense of relief in the track. "Big fat bluebird" I think is just her looking out of her bedroom window. It's as if she's looking around, taking note of what she sees, similar to in "California," except this time she is entirely content with it.

(still talking about EMA’s ‘Breakfast’)

Definitely with you on the relief thing. However, as much as I know a bluebird is an actual, ornithological reality in North America I can’t help but think just of the little birds flitting round people’s heads in cartoons (American cartoons, so maybe you think that too, but likely not in isolation). Something something simulacrum, I guess.

Yeah, it really is a beautiful song. Sonically I mostly associate it with the classic 90s ‘slowcore’ sound, as with ‘Anteroom’, but maybe it’s not sad enough?

EMA slowcore american exceptionalism

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mothsinamoshpit asked: I think that "Breakfast" is about having sex while her parents are in the next room. I take it as about the emotional side of sex, sort of a companion to "Milkman," which is a very physically sexual song.

Makes sense - or at least it’s the same as the interpretation given here.

It also gives an interesting contrast between “you feel just like a breeze to me” of this song, and “I wish that every time he touched me left a mark” of the preceding track, ‘Marked’. If anybody has any other thoughts, I’d be interested in hearing them.

EMA

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Vinyl Sunday - EMA, detail from Past Life Martyred Saints

“and when I looked on the computer… it was just an emptiness”

(‘Coda’)

happy new year, fuckers ;)

vinyl sunday EMA

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HFN 2011 - 1: EMA - ‘Butterfly Knife’ from Past Life Martyred Saints

EMA | PLMS | HFN 2011

This is one of two tracks from this album I haven’t posted (the other being ‘Breakfast’, which I’ve never been able to figure out what in hell it’s about). I still have some stuff written by other people on EMA that I want to string together, so I’m not finished with this album yet - it’d be pretty terrible if I was, right? - but for now, this is the last post of the year. Thanks for listening, and reading!

(also thanks to Lisa for noting that you can watch my “EMA fixation progress” in chronological order, by using that link. To pick up the point in her post, not only am I glad that at least some of you enjoyed my writing on EMA this year, but I immensely enjoyed having something of a focus and a topic which could be unfolded at length. I don’t consider myself to be by nature an obsessive kind of person, but I can analyse and ‘over’ think the fuck out of something if I appreciate it enough…)

EMA HFN 2011

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martynleung:

© Martyn Leung

Erika M. Anderson (EMA), photograph taken at Cargo, September 2011. Her album ‘Past Life Martyred Saints” has earned some rave reviews in the music and general press. After about ten listens, I’m not completely blown away by it, but I suspect it could be one of those records which slowly eats at me over time, and I’ll end up loving it. But watching her and her band live on stage is a different matter. I caught EMA three times this year, and loved the intensity, rawness and emotion displayed each time, I’m definitely looking forward to seeing her on a bigger stage next year.

I didn’t go to that many gigs this year, but mainly that meant the gigs I did go to were the ones I really wanted to see. So: Ham Sandwich’s long-delayed tribute to their late manager Derek Nally, which featured a host of musical guests and performances of classic pop songs such as ‘Gloria’ and ‘Walk on the Wild Side’; Si Schroeder’s momentary return to prominence with a very fine single for the long-awaited but unfortunately rather unlikely-sounding second album Holding Patterns; Dan Deacon, yet again; Grant Hart carrying the strength of his solo and Husker Du work on the sound of a ragged voice and otherwise unaccompanied electric guitar; Battles, mixing things up as usual; and most recently, human drum-and-bass combo Rarely Seen Above Ground whose Fugazi-meets-New Wave album I really liked in late 2008 but never got to see him until now.

But of course, the only gig that really mattered was the one I travelled across the Irish sea for, to see EMA perform one of her UK dates in London (and to finally get hold of the origin of the seemingly pretentious quote I have at the top of this blog). To be honest it probably wasn’t as utterly amazing as I could have imagined it - being on my own and in a venue which only served shit beer probably didn’t help - but it was still a superb gig by most standards, and fascinating to both feel the noise (live, ‘Marked’ is nothing if not Velvet Underground-ish) and to experience the theatrical rawness of the songs freed from the aspic of recording. And questions of ‘was it worth it to go all that way’ didn’t come into it, because it was great to explore London a bit and, in any case, I wasn’t not going to go see my by-far favourite artist of the year play when Dublin and London are so comparatively close.

This photograph, from that very gig, is pretty great because it shows EMA doing what she does best: inhabiting and transcending the ‘male’ rock persona. In fact, underneath the raised arm you can just see the pit hair - it’s kind of embarrassing for me to mention this (because when guys talk about women’s bodies in this way it usually has the effect of detracting from their intellectual and artistic endeavours, yadda yadda) but it’s something I generally find sexy and I had noticed right from the start in the ‘California’ video. It’s only a small thing, which shouldn’t be considered that unusual, but subjectively and symbolically I think it’s pretty awesome, and if you’re looking for somewhere to start (other than the music, obviously) with EMA, this little gesture of punk rock/feminism might not be too bad.

EMA live HFN 2011

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HFN 2011 - 9: GPOYWV edition

the top is my Twitter profile pic, with my favourite album of 2001 (not that I was actually aware of it then) and of all time, Hot Water Music’s A Flight and A Crash; the bottom - posted previously - is of course EMA’s Past Life Martyred Saints, my favourite by far of 2011 and probably up there in my current top 5 of all albums ever. yeah - I went there.

also this is apparently the year of me taking pictures of myself. with vinyl (although not in all cases).

ema hot water music HFN 2011

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