Album Of The Week: EMA The Future’s Void

Seven years ago, covering CMJ for the Village Voice, I tried to go see High Places at the Cake Shop in New York, and I got their early enough to see the final song of the band that was before them on the bill. That final song just about sucked my soul out through my mouth. A blonde woman was howling with a ferocious sort of devastation, her voice near tears and absolutely dominating the barely-there feedback-and-piano accompaniment: "You've gotta keep on going / You'll forget about me." I was awestruck. Surprises like that are supposed to happen at festivals like CMJ and SXSW -- they're kind of the point of those things -- but they almost never do, and I'm not sure I've felt a feeling like that one at any show since. The band turned out to be an L.A. trio named Gowns, and their album Red State, which I bought from the merch table that night, was full of crush-your-soul moments like that, at least when the noise-drone music got out of the way of the blonde woman, one Erika M. Anderson. Red State turned out to be the only album that Gowns ever released. But when Anderson went solo as EMA a few years later, we got to hear that voice at absolute full strength, wailing about high-plains high school hell and the deep, dark impossibility of moving to a new state and becoming the person you want to be. 2011's Past Life Martyred Saints, the first EMA album, is one of my two or three favorite indie rock albums of the past decade. And now The Future's Void, her second solo album, pushes that voice in some fascinating new directions, and I like it almost as much. Maybe I'll like it more in time. It's something special.