Lustful and sinister, apparently.
[Video][Website]
[6.90]
Alfred Soto: What she says pales beside her signifying: dirty organ, industrial percussion, vocals that evoke several generations of feminine desire. As much as I love this noise collage for its own sake, I don’t hear cohesion.
[5]
Kat Stevens: The last tune by EMA was a true nadir for my 2011 but after watching the video for “Milkman” — a Nathan Barley outtake where she dances under a row of tampons and vomits up a Kinder Egg onto a staircase only for it to explode in a cloud of powder — I get the joke now! I really hope the milkman in question is from a rip in the space-time continuum.
[4]
Hazel Robinson: PAGING INDIE VOCALISTS: if you’re going to sing loud, be comprehensible. That said, this does have something; it needs a total remaster to sort itself out, though. Noise is all very well, but this is basically a Knife song played through the world’s worst speakers.
[5]
Ian Mathers: I can’t decide whether I think this will go over better than “California.” On the one hand, it’s definitely more of a “song,” if that’s your thing; to quote, well, myself, it “sounds like Excepter and Xiu Xiu playing at the same time.” On the other hand, it lacks some of “California”‘s singularity and verbal punch, and, well, it sounds a bit like Excepter and Xiu Xiu playing at the same time. But if you can’t get behind the ecstatic panic of “he’s the milkman/he brings you your – milk!” I kind of feel bad for you.
[9]
Michelle Myers: EMA’s hyper-hip blend of distorted noisepop and gothy aesthetics works because she actually knows how to write a good tune. “Milkman” is energetic and catchy, and EMA’s voice grates my ears in just the right way.
[8]
Katherine St Asaph: Lyrically, “Milkman” is simple: desire as guerrilla battle. Sonically, it’s as clattery and distorted as if EMA drove a truck full of rusty bolts over the melody and her voice, and it’s as overstuffed with sound as any single of 2011. But everything crests and subsides rather than arbitrarily bludgeoning you with noise, making this exciting rather than painful.
[9]
Michaela Drapes: When EMA writhes and wails in this filthy little lust song, it’s remarkably free of tired feminine cliches — both of the good girl gone bad, or the bad girl who was never good to begin with. Her sexuality is incandescently boundless, borderless, engulfing, breathtaking.
[8]
Jer Fairall: Painted in the broad, menacing strokes of a fairy tale boogeyman, the blanks that she leaves to be filled in are all the more frightening for the knowledge that whatever occupies these gaps, it can’t be anything good. The music is far less evasive in its seething tantrum, though, and even if I appreciate it somewhat better on Past Life Martyred Saints, where its squalls disrupt the thickness of the atmosphere like a shower suddenly ejecting scalding hot water, it remains no less scarring in isolation.
[8]
Jonathan Bradley: Removed from the context of an album firmly stuck within one woman’s headspace, it’s remarkable how bright and energetic “Milkman” sounds. The guitars could have appeared on a Smashing Pumpkins record, and the key change going into the chorus almost counts as a pop move. It is Erika Anderson’s treated and distorted vocal that sends the tune to places stranger than post-grunge, however; why is she, as she drills into us repeatedly, “gasping”? Could the suffocating density of the instrumentation have something to do with it? It doesn’t quite make the titular milkman sinister, but the tape-loop stutter closing the song isn’t exactly comforting either.
[8]
Edward Okulicz: “Mikman” is a fairly unsympathetic mix of ideas both good and indistinct, arty but too overstuffed for its own good. I’m excited about the idea of women wailing and yowling and generally getting their sexuality on over something dirty, gauzy and dissonant, but this feels like the sort of thing first-year media studies students are given to study as “text.”
[5]