Listening diary 11th April, 2022: Emma Ruth Rundle - Marked for Death (dream pop, 2016)
I’m not sure this one would have such a strong emotional connection with me had I not overplayed it during the time when I was working solo shifts in a theatre café. It was a mainstay of my “rain playlist” back in 2017, along with albums like Scott 3, Pianos Become the Teeth’s Keep You and the discography of Swedish band The Amazing. All haunting, atmospheric, melancholic albums, perfect for the pseudo-sophisticated décor when the heavy rains of Auckland opened on our perennially empty wee café.
And in those long sessions, it really begins to reveal itself. On the surface, there’s not much here - it’s a singer songwriter album produced by people outside the traditional singer-songwriter scene. The songs are clearly simple guitar-and-voice numbers, but the strangely heavy guitars, dirty atmosphere and Emma’s dramatic and strained vocals all combine to make it something unlike anything else in the general oeuvre of singer-songwriters. To this day, I still don’t really know where to place it genre-wise. The songwriting is indebted to folk, country and slowcore, but there are arrangements that border on post-rock and even doom metal. I even find a spiritual link to a record like Opeth’s Damnation - certainly in the kind of pensive mood that holds throughout.
At the heart of all this lies Emma though, and her world-weary melancholy is beautifully captivating. The title track really stood out to me lyrically back in 2017 - rare for me as I often don’t care for lyrics - and to this day I love the deeply sorrowful poetry of it all. At the surface, this is a relatively simple album of simple songs, drenched in reverb and noise, but when you listen to it in the right mind and attach it with a period in time, it becomes one of those heavily potent nostalgia capsules, and far more than the sum of its parts.
8.2 (14th listen)
Part of my listening diary from my facebook music blog - www.facebook.com/TheExoskeletalJunction
