The first words Emma Ruth Rundle said after emerging from backstage and a welcoming round of applause at her LPR show last weekend, were delivered so gravely it almost sounded like a condemnation: “He is risen.” The concert date of Easter Sunday was an interesting choice for Rundle, an artist whose obsession with death is self-professed and extremely evident even in her sound, although perhaps not inappropriate. “We’re going to play through the whole album,” she said, referring to her latest, Engine of Hell, “going down one ring of hell at a time into its deepest depths, and then I promise we will reach the other side and land in blissful, ethereal outer space.” The reference to the Inferno was more than relevant as my friend and I had just come from a little bar around the corner called Dante, and it’s also exactly what her oeuvre feels like to me—water circling the death drain, with each successive album getting us closer and closer to the black hole at the center.
If you haven’t listened to her, I hope this doesn’t scare you off. Rundle is a personal favorite of mine, an artist I return to every year when the weather starts turning cold. Her work is appealing the same way autumn is: it’s rich, shadowy, and leans into the sacred and the occult. Warm enough to welcome listeners and cold enough to leave us with a satisfying shiver. Many of her songs from earlier albums could be classified as pop with their priority on melody. But each new album has gotten rockier and more primal, leading up to the supremely stark Engine of Hell. I had no idea when I mentioned it in my last review it would be up next—I characterized it as one of those “most raw and honest albums yet” that I have noticed of artists. Gone are the amped-up vocal sustain and layers of swirling guitars that tiptoe shoegaze. Engine of Hell is almost devoid of production, and many of the songs were recorded by Rundle alone with a guitar or piano in one take. Her naked voice is closer to the mic than ever. The lyrics echo the musical theme. She talks addiction, grief, and memories good and bad with little disguising them. It’s like she’s getting closer to the bone with each album, all excess trimmed on Engine of Hell. Yet even a professed maximalist like me finds these songs interesting, not boring. This album is sort of to Emma Ruth Rundle what Carrie and Lowell is to Sufjan Stevens, but I like it even better.
Face painted with Black Swan-like makeup, Rundle sat down at the piano and began our journey into the underworld with “Return.” Rundle’s speaking voice is deep and blunt, and with this first song the honey of her singing voice came out. Her enunciation was like ASMR. Crisp and sibilant consonants slithered and scraped and cut through her mournful vowels, creating a sensory experience like a dish in which you can taste each ingredient. I loved this; although loud concerts have their own pleasures, too often the emphasis on volume means a loss in audio quality. The elemental style of Engine of Hell combined with Rundle’s love of texture made for a unique listening experience in a live setting.
The evening felt appropriately haunted by a few ghosts of Rundle’s contemporaries and influences. On her next song, “Blooms of Oblivion,” Rundle painted a portrait of a modern-day Judas overtop a twangy guitar riff reminiscent of the beautiful “Flatlands” by gothy musical act and friend of Rundle’s, Chelsea Wolfe. Then when she started playing the piano intro to “Body,” I realized another influence which feels so obvious in retrospect: Tori Amos, queen of melancholy girls, and master of the keys. The intro to “Body” evoked “Marianne,” and two songs later when she sang softly on top of a repeating middle-keyboard phrase in “Dancing Man” I thought of a similarly arranged Amos song, “Not the Red Baron.” Plus, Amos’ teasing sacrilege in songs like “Father Lucifer” and “Muhammad my Friend” find echoes in Rundle’s biblical allusions. Both artists originate and land in a dark mytho-American musical landscape.
Rundle might lack Amos’ piano virtuosity, but this didn’t stop her from playing beautifully. I think Pitchfork’s review of Engine of Hell missed the point when it complained about the “airiness” of her piano arrangements. Lushness may belong to her first album Some Heavy Ocean, but not here. Any more fleshed out and these songs would lose their crucially skeletal form. Rundle created drama on the keys through skillful heavy-light dynamics that mirrored her consonant-vowel play. And at the last chorus of “Body,” about the death of her grandmother who gifted her a piano as a child, she shocked me by using the piano reverb pedal as a percussion, once every two beats, holding down and letting go to create a deep, hollow thunk, resonating out like a drum for a funeral dirge.
As we descended the rings of hell with Rundle, each new song revealed something vulnerable that I didn’t take for granted was being shared with us audience members. “The Company” was a particularly heavy one delving into alcoholism. The theme of addiction cropped up again in a different tone in “Razor’s Edge”: a rare instance of major chords sounded almost frolicsome on the guitar, paired with the coy but dark lyrics of a girl plying her partner for her heroin fix. But the standout to me was “Dancing Man.” Rundle gave a little introduction to this song before playing, how it’s about a beautiful anchor memory of hers in the springtime long ago. She described how the delicate fragrance of cherry blossoms always transports her back to that moment. Smell is the sense most tied to memory, they say, and I was struck by the idea that the cyclical nature of seasons means that the smells and sights and sounds of a particular time of year can trigger us into remembering the last time. It makes sense then if the line “shoot me down, Chinatown” is a reference to the movie about memory, time, cycles, repetition, doom. But “Dancing Man” adds to these a sense of gratitude for memories as a place of comfort and rebirth. This to me is the true thesis of the album.
For the last two songs of Engine of Hell, Rundle invited her opener Patrick Shiroishi back onstage with a saxophone accompaniment—not the melodramatic kind from the ‘80s but a softer, spookier one. While Rundle showed off her vocal abilities on “Citadel,” the sax added an evocative and ghostly high note, like a human voice responding from far away. “In My Afterlife” finished our walkthrough of the album and had us finally “free drifting through Saturn’s debris,” as she promised. Rundle didn’t stay offstage for long afterward. She encore’d with two songs, with “Marked for Death,” a classic from her second album rendered acoustic, and also one I’d never heard before called “Pump Organ Song.” The lyrics that told of the anticlimactic disintegration of a marriage also applied to where we were at in the setlist. “How does it end?” she asked, with a final plunk on the piano.
When encountering Emma Ruth Rundle, it can help to believe in some kind of resurrection, be it the Christian kind, reincarnation, or simply the season cycle always bringing spring around again. Even Rundle was able to make self-aware jokes about the heavy material between songs that kept the mood buoyant. By the end she felt less like Dante and more like Persephone, someone who must once a cycle descend to hell, but who always makes it out alive with something beautiful to show for it. I can’t wait for her next return.
