Top10 LP’s 2011: #4 Past Life Martyred Saints ~EMA

EMA has been one of the hardest albums for me to deal with all year. Its like nothing that I really listen to and I think I lack a lot of the language to aptly describe what is going on musically. Further its been turned inside out at great length by a number of blogs that I respect (see in particular, HFN) and I’m not sure I’ve got much more to add to the discourse. So I guess I will throw some platitudes around and wrap this up. The album is impossibly honest. Starting with “Grey Ship” the raspy vocals and stripped down production remove any gloss over what feels like an emotional raw diary in LP form. Its so god damned compelling. It feels like a modern In Memoriam or at least what every overly honest livejournal felt like to the author. More broadly there is something very individual to listening experience, as much as EMA is writing very precisely about her own experiences the album still reads differently for each listener as there is enough linguistic ambiguity and musical space to bring ones own experiences onboard. Ultimately there is some ineffable quality that continues to bring me back to the LP and I don’t think I will ever be able to fully capture what it is about a song like “Marked” that makes me hit repeat again and again.