The haunting Goddess that is Emma Ruth Rundle just doesn’t know when to stop. Since releasing an EP as a founder member of The Nocturnes in 2008, she has released a product every year with Post-Rockers Red Sparowes and under her own guises. Oft mentioned in glowing terms alongside such powerful performers as PJ Harvey, Tori Amos and Lana Del Rey, On Dark Horses (Sargent House) is the LA chanteuse’s fourth album under her own name, and is again filled with deep, shuddering emotion.
Opener ‘Fever Dreams’ drips tension and beauty, its quiet yet charged verses tethered by a leash and enhanced by grinding, swelling choruses which fully justifies those Amos comparisons. The pounding bassline of ‘Control’ is decorated by the twang of dark Country, with another brief chorus sending power to the skies. Scattergun rhythms compete with Rundle’s edgy yet mellifluous tones, exemplified on the breathless, sensual ‘Darkhorse’: a hypnotic, febrile animal that stays and bucks like the surging sea, the plaintive voice dipping and soaring amid euphoric explosions so expertly dictated by dextrous, powerful drums and punctured by touching, stark introspection.
The balladic ‘Races’ is a Johnny Cash-influenced darkness: guitar strings shaking the bones, the vocal delivery tear-inducing, the atmospherics stirring and in keeping with labelmates Jaye Jayle. The underlying rhythmic thrum of ‘Dead Set Eyes’, meanwhile, is subtle yet utterly addictive with a howling solo vibrating through the track’s eruption, and the harmonies and cascading tones of the bridge leading to a passionate yet indolent coda.
‘Light Song’ begins with the continual, humble throb of a lowly cello amid an almost Doom-esque oppression, Rundle’s voice maintaining its lightness until accompanied by the phenomenal baritone of Jaye Jayle frontman Evan Patterson. The vocal contrast at the halfway point is delicious as are the lead jangles guiding toward the closing burst of noise which is still, incredibly, reined in. Full of the barely-controlled intensity of Big|Brave, the arrangement of this glorious track is perfect and leaves one wondering where else the album can go: the ensuing, heartbreaking patter of ‘Apathy on the Indiana Border’, however, cures any such considerations. Lynch-like in its icy-cold splendour, the lyrics speak of ought but indifference and the quelled aspects resonate as impressively as the squally feedback of the finale.
Closer ‘You Don’t Have to Cry’ will ensure that you do. The sparsity and depth of instrumentation matches Rundle’s incredibly emotional delivery, coupled with words that touch every fibre; a way of looking forward wrapped in the pain of loss. Quite simply, this woman is beyond superlative, a creative entity able to spark and crush every synapse in the human body, who has once again produced an album that truly touches the soul.
9.0/10.0
PAUL QUINN