Album Review: Emma Ruth Rundle - On Dark Horses
I don’t want to say that I use the debilitating depression I
found myself in for a large portion of 2015 and most of 2016 as an excuse, or
whatever, for sleeping on a lot of albums, but the poor state of my mental
health during this time made it difficult to keep up the momentum needed to
continually listen to and write about new music, let alone, like, get out of
bed and function as a person.
One of the albums that I had downloaded and had every intent
of listening to in the fall of 2016, when I was transitioning out of working for
the paper, into working at the co-op, was Marked
For Death, the sophomore album from raucous guitarist and vocalist Emma
Ruth Rundle.
However, the album when unlistened to, and a review when
unwritten—like so many others that have both come before it, and after it.
Rundle has returned, two years later, with her third solo
full-length, On Dark Horses and after
listening to it, two things are abundantly clear—the first is that I made a
huge mistake by missing out on Marked For
Death upon its release; the second is that, from the moment On Dark Horses begins, Emma Ruth Rundle
is not here to fuck around.
Throughout the album’s eight tracks—it’s entirely too short,
if you ask me—Rundle is unrelenting in her ability to channel an otherworldliness
with her unhinged howl, as well as creating and maintaining a tone and
atmosphere, allowing it to unfold naturally through the progression of the
album, and making everything she does appear effortless.
Right out of the gate, when Rundle and her stable of players
slam down on the pummeling and thundering first notes of the opening track,
“Fever Dreams,” it’s apparent that Rundle—in her time spent as a solo artist,
as well as performing in myriad outfits—is an expert at balancing tension and release.
“Fever Dreams,” for example, like a number of other songs on the record, both
snarls ferociously, and soars triumphantly. It’s a startling give and take—making
these things occur within the same song—and it makes On Dark Horses an incredibly surprising, refreshing, and wholly
original record.
Rundle structures On
Dark Horses so that it isn’t so much frontloaded with its most compelling
material, but the first half is pretty much unfuckwithable—a practically
flawless run of four songs that are both accessibly written, but are also
boiling over with a torrential, visceral nature. The album loses this momentum
slightly after it hits the halfway point, beginning with “Dead Set Eyes.” It’s
maybe also at this point in the record, five songs in, when the sound that
Rundle has ultimately committed to for On
Dark Horses, may lead you to believe things are beginning to come across as
a little ‘samey.’
That ‘sound’ is really the album’s fatal flaw, but it’s also
quite admirable just how strong Rundle’s brand is—overall, from album to album,
but also specifically on On Dark Horses.
In even just sampling her previous efforts, you can hear Rundle’s development
of this haunted, borderline tormented aesthetic, and in this collection of
songs, the aesthetic peaks.
While she snarls and soars on “Fever Dreams,” she commands
cacophonic, furious blasts on “Control,” balancing those out with a
quiet/loud/quiet structure to the song’s arrangement; with the album’s longest
song, “Darkhorse,” the pummeling rhythm (thanks to drummer Dylan Naydon) powers
the song forward, while Rundle creates a swooning, dizzying, and hypnotic
environment, strumming out distorted and distended guitar chords like her life
depended on it, speaking in disjointed, evocative imagery—“It’s the darkhorse we give legs to, no one else can ride; In the wake
of strange beginnings, we can still stand high.”
As the album’s first side closes, she slows things down to a
dreamy, hazy crawl with “Races,” repeating the phrase, “Nothing’s gonna stop us,” making it a mantra of sorts.
The high point of the album’s second side also happens to be
its final track—it may not be where she snarls the hardest (that is saved,
mostly, for the first half), but it is, without a doubt, where she soars the
highest. In doing so, Rundle takes On
Dark Horses to a place of unthought-of majesty—“You Don’t Have to Cry,” is,
in a sense, the inverse of the visceral tension and anguish of the first side,
swapping it out for a huge, sweeping, cathartic exhale.
It goes without saying that On Dark Horses is true to its name—it’s a dark record, with little,
if any, light that is able to break through the world Rundle builds. It’s not
sad, or hopeless, but it by no means a joyful collection of songs. In that
darkness, Rundle thrives, however, creating relatively concise and focused
songs that live in a pensive, tension filled, and at times dramatic
environment. Rundle drenches everything in sight, including her voice, in
layers of cavernous reverb, making it, at times seem like On Dark Horses is broadcasting from deep within the Earth, or from
another plane entirely.
There are songs that can be taken on their own—removed from
the context of On Dark Horses, but
the album itself, I believe, is meant to be listened to as a whole, from
beginning to end, connected by Rundle’s penchant for ominous and overcast
tones, as well as similar themes that run loosely through each of the eight
tracks. Through the crunchy distortion and seemingly endless and swirling
echoes, with On Dark Horses, Rundle
has established herself as a performer not to be trifled with, and has made a huge,
mesmerizing, and surprisingly gorgeous artistic statement.
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