Emma Ruth Rundle
These Killing Times
ERRANT CHILD
There’s always been a mystical, otherworldly quality to Emma Ruth Rundle’s songs. Since releasing her debut album 15 years ago, the Portland-based songwriter has been crafting music that hangs like mist above the Earth, both part of this world but also apart from it. That has plenty to do with her mesmerizing vocals, which twist and dance and careen on top of her equally entrancing songs. In fact, each of the eight tracks on this new full-length feels like some kind of séance, an offering to whatever gods may lie above (or, most likely, below). There’s a raw wretchedness to her voice, demonic and angelic in equal measure, that’s full of fear and vulnerability. But then again, what would you have expected with a title like These Killing Times?
There’s very little ambiguity that that title refers to the techno-fascist oligarchy we find ourselves in these days, where those with the power are gleefully trying to eradicate and make redundant manmade art—manmade anything, really—in order to enslave us within their planned dystopia. Of course, the antidote to that, beyond guillotines, is to reclaim our humanity as best we can, and turn our grievances and pain into something meaningful, that asserts just how much it takes to make art, that it can’t be replicated, that out of the ashes of modern society there is still hope and beauty to be found.
That’s exactly what this record does. It begins with “Powerless,” which is anything but. “Let me lie here with a hammer in my hand,” Rundle snarls in a tone that’s both hopeful and hopeless as guitars and drums crash around her, “One for breaking, one for building something better.” It’s a mission statement for, and a description of, what follows. Even the gentle, breathy “God’s Picture”—almost jazzy in places, but also always on the verge of soaring far from these ruinous times, either toward absolution or oblivion, or perhaps both—contains an undertow.
Made with a host of collaborators, These Killing Times captures the existential uncertainty and anguish of being alive right now. Whether that’s the tortured crawl of “Anvil,” the hushed and soulful incantation of “Don’t Delay Heaven,” or the howling, cursed fire of “Human Kindness”—the closest any of these songs gets to May Our Chambers Be Full, Rundle’s 2020 LP with sludge-metalers Thou—these songs unlock a primal terror that everybody should be feeling right now. It doesn’t help to quell it, but it does help you realize you’re not alone—and that’s worth a hell of a lot in this dark and desperate day and age for which Rundle named the record.
