Emma Ruth Rundle’s New Album Will Devastate You

Early on in ‘Blooms of Oblivion’, one of the standout songs from Emma Ruth Rundle new album Engine of Hell, the singer finds herself sitting in a Methadone clinic, accompanying a friend — perhaps a lover? — who is awaiting the delivery of their cure.

The scene is a narrative snippet; a shred of time that expands outwards, gesturing at an entire relationship; a past; a potential future. In no more than three lines, each word carefully chosen, Rundle compacts a way of living into its most essential, direct form. “Here,” she says. “This is where we are. This is where we are going.”

It is Raymond Carver’s maxim for good writing — get in, get out, don’t linger, go on — taken to its natural endpoint, a way of making art that highlights, first and foremost, direct communication. There are no tricks here; no obfuscations of meaning, or creative sleights-of-hand. Rundle says what she means and means what she says, even as she nestles her truisms in allusions to Christian theology and science fiction novels.

The word for this might be “intimacy”. One always gets the sense that Rundle has your ear and your ear alone in mind, that her voice has travelled so many miles to hold you against a feeling and to nail you there. Engine of Hell tattoos itself on the wet chambers of your heart, transforming the personal into the public. You might never have taken someone you care about to a clinic, or begged a lover to embrace you once more, as on ‘Return’, but such is Rundle’s conviction — her unceasing, insistent clarity — that you will feel as though you have — that her stories are your stories.

Much of that is a result of Rundle’s newfound subtlety. In the past, the musician has always been a minimalist thinker with a maximalist’s ear, a master of expressing the quietest, most discrete emotional states in the loudest, widest possible way. Marked For Death, the album that announced her as one of the most fascinating singer-songwriters on the international stage, displayed this most clearly, tucking secrets into the torn leather interior of crashed cars. Her rusted, expansive guitar solos felt a thousand miles wide; her choruses the size of mountains.

That means, very often, that Rundle’s songs only click into place long after they have finished.

But here, Rundle has dropped that sense of scale. Engine of Hell never rises to more than a whisper, stripping back songs to their most essential form. ‘Citadel’, the penultimate song on the album, is so gentle as to feel almost imperceptible, art as a background condition.

That means, very often, that Rundle’s songs only click into place long after they have finished. They come into focus slowly, echoing around the corners of your mind, their lessons imparted like fluid running through an I.V. ‘In My Afterlife’, with its references to the movement of vast celestial bodies and the ornate mechanics of Hell, reveals itself gently, in the silence after it has finished. “I have a feeling I might be here a while,” Rundle sings, her voice barely above a whisper, an understated piano line arranged like ropes in patterns on the floor.

It is the whole universe at once, the work of a musician who has set themselves the task of naming each thing that they see, imprinting the visible world with meaning.

That is not by any means to imply that this is an unassuming album. It might be slow, hushed, but there is viciousness here too, the single-mindedness of a surgeon’s scalpel. ‘Body’, a treatise on being what the philosopher Jean-Paul Sarte would call “a thing in the world”, opens old wounds, speaking to the shame and beauty of being trapped in a mortal form. There is nowhere that Rundle is afraid to go; no corner of the room that is unlit.

Rundle has never made music like this before. Few songwriters have. It is the whole universe at once, the work of a musician who has set themselves the task of naming each thing that they see, imprinting the visible world with meaning. And then it is over, reverberating with a final strike of the piano, settling on the listener like snow. Like ash.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Music Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp. For more of his reviews, read this piece on Lingua Ignota’s Sinner Get Ready.