Exile In The Outer Ring (Indie Exclusive Red Vinyl)
LP
ROCK
CITY SLANG 0050121
UPC: 4250506822637
Release Date: 8/25/2017
$19.99
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Artist Biography
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After the success of 2011’s
‘Past Life Martyred Saints’ and 2014’s prophetic ‘The Future’s Void’, EMA
retreated to a basement in Portland, Oregon – a generic apartment complex in a
non-trendy neighborhood, with beige carpeting and cheap slat blinds. Now, she
returns, with a portrait of The Outer Ring: A pitch-black world of dark night
highways, American flags hung over basement windows, jails and revival meetings
and casinos and rage. In a year dominated by white working-class alienation and
anger, EMA – a Midwesterner who never lost her thousand-yard stare -- has
delivered an album that renders Middle American poverty and resentment with
frightening realism and deep empathy.
“I want to explain to outsiders that the people where I come from aren’t beyond
hope and reason”, says EMA, “I want this record to bridge a divide.” The album,
co-produced with Jacob Portrait of Unknown Mortal Orchestra, is a return to
EMA’s roots in the noise-folk outfit Gowns, whose 2007 album Red State
prefigured many of Exile’s core themes, along with its mix of stripped-back folk
(“Always Bleeds,” originally a Gowns song), spoken word (“Where the Darkness
Began”) and noise epics (“Breathalyzer”). The album is unique in its mingling of
gender politics with American working-class anxiety. The voices we hear in these
songs — druggy, surly societal outcasts; Byronic nihilists bringing down fire —
speak to a kind of rebellion that’s typically reserved for men, and the
archetype of the “dirtbag teenage boy” dominates the album. Yet EMA claims some
of that same dirtbag alienation for women — “a woman who swallowed a scumbag
teen boy whole,” as EMA puts it – and uses it to interrogate both her own
vulnerability and how male violence shapes the world, as on the anthemic “Aryan
Nation.” The result is a deeply personal, confrontational, but ultimately
redemptive album from a quintessentially American artist at the peak of her
form.