EMA: Past Life Martyred Saints

Label: Souterrain Transmissions

EMA is Erika M. Anderson, and she is already the most talked-about (sigh, okay -- blogged-about) new artist of 2011. Her old band Gowns released one darkly perfect album, Red State, in 2008, and the roiling emotions on it -- and in the band itself -- tore them apart. Anderson hasn't really remade herself; she simply ducked out for a spell and returned with an album that's of a piece with Gowns but so full in conception and power that it doesn't feel right to associate it with anything that's come before. Over stark, bracing arrangements of synth, guitar and percussion she holds her soul up to the light for all to see, then tears from it, claws at it and howls sacraments to it. That she does all this with vulnerability and a staggering musicality -- her pop sense wins out but she structures her songs like the human-scale epics they are -- is what makes Past Life Martyred Saints the debut of the year. (So far, sure, but color me impressed if anyone tops it.) "Milkman" is a pop song that simmers, then boils, and finally fries itself dry. "Coda" is a one-minute layered vocal round of gospel intensity, and "Marked" features the most-quoted lyric from the album. To get to those, though, you first have to encounter opener "The Grey Ship," not to mention the nerve-charging follower "California," and those? Just plain -- damn.