EMA is Ericka M. Anderson. Exile in the Outer Ring is her vision of American despair and marginalization. Yup.

When I selected Past Life Martyred Saints as my top album of 2011, Ericka M. Anderson was straight out of the American underground, not an artist widely recognized. EMA, professionally and for short, had released material with two groups, Amps for Christ and the Gowns, but PLMS was her solo debut, and it was on a small label called Souterrain Transmissions. If you want a little background, here’s a link to my original review and my 2011 Top 25: http://stevemahoot.blogspot.com/search?q=past+life+martyred+saints

With the 2014 release of The Future’s Void, EMA consolidated her stature as an artist to be reckoned with. After the viscerally powerful PLMS, Void was a colder, more technocratic vision. Like it’s ambiguous title, the music conveyed a vision of a sterile and oppressive near tomorrow, like something out of a William Gibson novel, humanity struggling with the powers of its own creation, with the alienations of the internet age.

Void’s slabs of distorted sounds were a blurred borderline of guitars and electronics. With many powerful songs and performances, it was by no means a disappointment. But it did feel like a way station of a kind, a Diamond Dogs waiting for a Low or Heroes. EMA’s new album, Exile in the Outer Ring, reminds, as much of anything, of the records Bowie made, and made with Iggy Pop, in Berlin in the late Seventies - contemporary, plugged in, but earthbound in its vision. Similarly, Outer Ring isn’t so much about future shock as the dreariness of the grout in the bathroom of the Quik Trip. And like Iggy’s The Idiot and Lust for Life, Outer Ring bumps and grinds with a similar deployment of textures that meld historic rock guitar sounds with electronics, old and new. 

Entitling an album “Exile in/on” anything invites comparison to Exile on Main Street and Exile in Guyville. Not perhaps in stylistic terms so much as a certain demand for excellence, positing Outer Ring as a work that will endure and influence. A reasonable confidence, I think. 

Anderson’s “Outer Ring” is a long ways from the Rings of Tolkien. It’s a place where the blue of the cities meets the red of small town America. The nothing municipalities that sit between gentrification and broken versions of a rural idyll. Purple suburbs with shitty schools, easy access to dope, minimum wage jobs, strip malls along frontage roads filled with nail salons and payday loan offices. Coming home from Future’s frontier, Outer Ring is a bringing it all back home of boredom, despair, cheap thrills and sometimes resistance. The future is a safety zone, however you posit it, the present is something you can only lie to yourself about by singeing your psyche. 

Anderson’s characters and tales of the Outer Ring are packed with little details, resonant reference points with a present sense of dread. In the backseat of a Toyota Camry the protagonist in “Breathalyzer” “feels so high, feels so heavy,” a “kid from the void,” as described in “I Wanna Destroy,” a figure for whom “getting high is a family tradition,” lining up outside the casino in “Aryan Nation,” someone who’s “just what you made me” in “Blood and Chalk.”

Anderson’s exiles are bewildered, self-incriminating. They know something is wrong and they’re told it’s them, “Saying you need a sense of purpose when you’re on the floor. Think that maybe you deserve it if you’re poor.” But the reality of MC5’s “American Ruse” is alive and not so well in Anderson’s 2017 vision - “Tell me stories of famous men; I can’t see myself in them.” In Trump’s America shit is upside down. The sunlight reveals what’s ugly, people find shelter in shadows of self and history. The Outer Ring is Oxyland, where self-annihilation is attractive because the true self is unreflected. 

The sounds of the Outer Ring are electronic, but never rigid or mechanical. Anderson loves to bring out lines of melody and counterpoint from the bass/base of drone that throbs through these songs. PLMS, Void, and Outer Ring all albums that begin with the sound of static. Here, “Seven Years, (Bowie had “Five Years”) arises from that static, a beautiful blend of acoustic guitar and sythn, chronicling a history of assault in ballad form. Anderson evokes Suicide and Patti Smith, and Talking Heads (“The Overload”), melodic strands sinewing from the drone. There are shades of Springsteen in the “Badlands” quality of these evocations, think Nebraska if it was produced by Brian Eno. 

The David and Iggy in Berlin vibe is especially vivid in “Fire Water Air LSD,” a recitative over garbled electronics reminiscent of “Sister Midnight.” Anderson’s a Dakota kid blasting power chords on the self-descriptive “33 Nihilistic and Female,” personal, but also reminding me of a pronouncement from the heart of The Sabotage Cafe, by novelist Joshua Furst. Like any original, Anderson is unafraid to show her roots. “Always Bleeds” throbs with a Peter Hook baseline, and a syncopated phrasing straight outta the Strokes “Last Nite,”and exemplifies her deceptively lovely way with a tune.

Outer Ring says goodbye with the spoken word of “Where the Darkness Began.” Delivered like a pirate radio broadcast from “a basement in the outer ring,” Anderson locating the darkness both around and within. 

With Exile in the Outer Ring EMA does not flinch. Ericka M. Anderson isn’t afraid to stare into the abyss of contemporary America. Or behold the turbulence of her own soul.