As we are coming up towards Hallowe’en, it seems appropriate that we should get some sort of haunting into our lives. The new album from Emma Ruth Rundle, erstwhile of Los Angeles noise merchants Marriages and latterly of solo artist of some renown, might just be the perfect accompaniment for the dark night of All Hallows’ Eve and then many more to come.
Marked for Death (Sargent House) is the follow-up to the 2014 opus Some Heavy Ocean. Rundle has taken what was effectively a confessional record, painted in folky hues of a very gothic nature and taken her art to an altogether new level of confessional and devastating brilliance.
The eight songs presented here hang loosely together as a coherent reflection of what sounds like a doomed relationship. We are offered an insight into a private life with all its vagaries, challenges and often painful reality. It is personal, often alarmingly so, but set to music that is completely beguiling and believable.
The low-fi atmospherics of opening and title track, Marked for Death, with its echoes of The Sundays sets the tone with apposite candour: “Who else is going to love someone like you that’s marked for death?” A dark night of the tortured soul it is, then. Rundle’s struggles with emotional commitment for this relationship are candidly aired on ‘Protection’ where her sense of inadequacy is laid bare. She laments: ” I am worthless in your arms/But you offer this protection no one else is giving me.” ‘Protection’s’ coda, a swirling electric guitar sees the artist use her instrument as a decoy for her voice and emotional pain. It is undeniably bleak and heavy stuff but stuff you cannot help but keep listening.
On Medusa, where the intensity of the first part of the album is given some respite thanks to a vocal performance that suggests the artist knows the Sunday’s Harriet Wheeler and the Cocteau Twin’s Elizabeth Fraser‘s back catalogues fabulously well. Elsewhere, her talent for atmospheric confessional continues brilliantly, notably on the starkly beautiful ‘Heaven’ and the anguished ‘Furious Angel’ with its insistent and crushing guitar parts adding to the sense of drama and suffocation.
The closing track ‘Real Big Sky’ is a song that leaves you believing that there is some sort of salvation at the end of all of her pain. Against the backdrop of a low-fi amp with an acoustic guitar, her vocal is almost transcendant. At times it is reminiscent of the stark honesty that Polly Harvey captured so well on her Rid of Me album. There is a brooding intimacy that the guitar part only seeks to highlight. The narration is the eternal challenge of how to deal with grief and not just survive but thrive. In amongst the hurt there is hope, and hope eternal.
Marked for Death is a record that sees the artist grapple with forces perhaps outside of her control, resigned that this relationship was perhaps ultimately doomed and reflective of how to take forward her life. In this “Look at Me” age, where everyone attempts to outdo one another in the honesty stakes, it is startling when you come across an artist whose ability to convey her vulnerability, heartache and gut-wrenching sorrow is as brilliant in this. One takes no pleasure in her pain but her ability to use her art as emotional catharsis is self-evident and utterly compelling.This is heavy, unsettling but, ultimately, valedictory stuff, and a haunting you will be happy to have continue for a long, long time.
8.5/10
MAT DAVIES