I have a confession to make here.This is second time around between me and EMA, which is why it’s taken me a while to write about it. We had a brief dalliance in London, I nipped in for a quickie as it were, one night back in May when she was playing at the Macbeth. Sadly between all the crowds and the hype it never really took off between us. And this despite EMA causing most of the female-fancying half of the audience to choke on their drinks when she squirmed a bit, said that she had never worn suspenders before and was having trouble with them tonight. Of course she meant the braces holding her jeans up, curse that common language we share for getting our hopes up. So anyway, I wandered off into the night shrugging my shoulders. This of course was a great mistake, which took me a month or two and CD copy of Past Life Martyred Saints to put right. The album is a rumbling odyssey, somewhere between Patti Smith, beat poets of the Alan Ginsberg ilk, Belly in their glorious heyday and musical progressions that might have come from the Doors breaking through from the other side. That sounds like a heap of praise, so I’ll put it into context. I’ve got a dozen new CDs to listen to. I keep giving them a spin, throwing them back out and putting this back in the player. If you want to get there quick, jump to track 2 – ‘California’. It’s not even an obviously accessible song: spoken words “Fuck California…” over descending fuzzed chords, a paean to the corrupting coruscation of American life. It gets to a point of such sadness that our heroine doesn’t mind the thought of dying at the age of 22, while her mind wanders off to hum the chorus of ‘Camptown Races’.
Or groove to the plucked string and moaning intro to ‘Butterfly Knife’ which progresses prettily into Edvard Munch territory and tells of twenty kisses with the eponymous blade, while “only God can make it right” and we gain the vague impression of the clapped out lines of a spiritual played out in the background.
Half-track ‘Coda’ sings Sunday School rounds about emptiness that makes you “want to throw up on the spot“, and all the time such pretty voices hidden in the machine. I could go on, there isn’t a duff piece of filler in here. It is serious stuff, at the same entertaining and immensely satisfying. If you have any inkling of a cracked life beyond the obvious, do not make the mistake I made of walking on by. Stop now and listen.
[Rating: 4]
