EMA Matures in Dark "Future"

By COURTESY MATADOR

Erika M. Anderson has one of the finest voices of her generation of art-rock auteurs—and it’s to her credit that she doesn’t rely on it alone. In her full-length debut as EMA, 2011’s “Past Life Martyred Saints,” she complements it with hauntingly bleak instrumentation and stretches it with unconventional song structures, from the opening seven-minute odyssey “The Grey Ship” to the noise rock of “California” and “Milkman.” It’s incessantly captivating, and her second effort, “The Future’s Void,” is further in the same vein, revealing Anderson to be as exceptional a musician as a singer, with rhythm and texture at the center of its success.

It’s dark and beat-driven—the first single, “Satellite,” opens the record with a wash of static, a feedback tone, and drum-machine handclaps, and within two minutes Anderson’s vocals fade under a Trent Reznorian electronic clatter. The percussion, inconspicuously deemphasized on “Past Life,” is the dominant presence on many of these tracks, and it’s responsible for some of the record’s best moments. “Neuromancer” is centered on a beat of machine-gun fire, breaking glass, and trash can lids, and it would be the record’s highlight were it not for lyrics like “making a living on taking selfies, is that the way that you want to be? / You’re such a narcissistic baby, you’re such a new millennial baby” that try insipidly for the voguish critiques of party culture EMA’s contemporaries have mastered.

The lyrics interrogate the Internet, fame, and technology with inconsistent success. The echoing ballad “3Jane” is interesting more in concept than for lines like “Feel like I blew my soul out across the Interweb and screamed / It was a million pieces of silver, watch them gleam,” but “100 Years” considers centuries of human progress in vivid figurative terms. It’s the Cold War at the heart of “Satellite”—its most ear-catching moment is when the beat switches and Anderson intones “I remember when the world was divided / by a wall of concrete and a curtain of iron.”

There’s an abstract style and sinister tone to the record’s better lyrics, in tune with the blackened instrumentals. “Cthulu” opens like an unreleased “Yeezus” track, with a synthesizer pulse that bleeds into distorted guitar, and the potential reference to the song’s Lovecraftian namesake closes the record’s most chilling lines: “There is the moment of the perfection / I’m looking those moments all my life / ’Cause if you can’t find any perfection / You know the other is inside.” The simple guitar-and-drum piece “When She Comes” functions similarly, with predictions “They’ll be begging for their lives / When they come” that draw power from their ambiguity before ending suddenly with an existential inquiry: “Not too long we’re in this world / So what’d you even come here for?”

Anderson is in fine vocal form—“The Future’s Void” is a reversal of the voice-centric composition of “Past Life,” but her performance gives it balance. Her greatest virtue is versatility—she sings like three goddesses of alternative rock in one. It’s the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ Karen O she channels on the record’s uptempo material, the stabbed yelps of “Cthulu” and the lo-fi rocker “So Blonde,” and Björk on the contemplative “Smoulder” and “100 Years.” Her aggressive whine on “Neuromancer” shows the influence of Sonic Youth’s Kim Gordon. In each of these modes, her voice is no longer the center of her songwriting, it’s textural—a layer in the instrumentation or a component of the beat.

With this dynamic, “The Future’s Void” is the ideal of the second album for an artist whose debut is as stylistically well-defined as EMA’s. “Past Life” is centered on her forceful vocals, its instrumentation and structure providing the backdrop. Her voice is present enough on “The Future’s Void” for the record to feel like hers, but with its essentiality to her music already established, she’s used her second release to develop the other side of her sound—her dark, ethereal composition. It isn’t a safe move, but its success shows EMA maturing intelligently.

—Staff writer Austin Siegmund-Broka can be reached at asiegemund-broka@college.harvard.edu.