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EMA, Exile in the Outer Ring (City Slang)
[POST-INDUSTRIAL SPRAWL] On Erika M. Anderson's latest deep recon mission into the American psyche, she inhabits the Outer Ring, a fictionalized reference to the very real zone surrounding most cities inhabited by those who've been pushed out of urban centers. These are songs of the hopeless, the disenfranchised, the angry—those who, in Anderson's own words, "drive Toyota Camrys and get fucked up in Best Buy parking lots." Giving their lives an eerie sheen redolent of dingy alleys lit only by headlights, she smears noise, clanging beats and mangled synths across a bleak lyrical canvas. At this point in Anderson's career, she sounds like a hybrid cooked up in Trent Reznor's laboratory, an experiment in splicing Karen O at her scuzziest with Julee Cruise at her creepiest. She may critique some aspects of Outer Ringers' lives—most notably on "Aryan Nation," in which she sings, "Tell me stories of famous men/I can't see myself in them"—but she's not removed from the narrative. Describing herself as "33, nihilistic and female," the transplanted Portlander pulls from her experience growing up in South Dakota, placing herself outside the nü-bourgeois institutions of the Inner Ring. Were Exile in the Outer Ring simply a smear piece on the new blue-collar class—or worse, a Hillbilly Elegy—it wouldn't be nearly as effective or harrowing. As it is, the album presents a frightening-but-empathetic look at the forgotten living in impoverished limbo between urban and rural.
SEE IT: EMA plays PICA at Hancock, 15 NE Hancock St., as part of the Time-Based Art Festival, on Sunday, Sept. 10. 10:30 pm. $8 PICA members, $10 general admission. All ages.