Vulnerability, truth 

Emma Ruth Rundle’s Engine of Hell – Live at Roadburn is a raw rendition of her fifth solo album originally released on November 5, 2021. As a fan of anything live, hearing Emma Ruth Rundle’s energy is subtle and enticing. For fans of Alanis Morissette and Wet Leg, the vocals are the perfect mix of ache and Rhian Teasdale’s deliciously delicate drawl. This is not to say that Emma Ruth Rundle sounds like a lovechild of theirs in any sense but more like an ominous cosmic third sister. Opening with a laud of claps and cheers from an eager audience, Rundle introduces herself and the album saying that she’s “going to play the album from the beginning to the end, for you.”  

The piano in “Return” is melancholic and solemn. Rundle’s vocals, soaked with deep agonizing pain, sing “you stumble to the cellar door and your fragments glitter the eyelids of a child.” A nod to the fragments of the psyche, and maybe Tolkien and Darko fans, are played with here as she pleads for the figment to “return again.”  

“Blooms of Oblivion” is wrought with imagery of death and addiction. Alluding to “Judas [who]… visits in visions,” the next verse consists of a visit to the methadone clinic in hopes “to take home [your] cure.” Rundle writes in wicked imagery wrought with religious allegory and allusion. 

In “Body,” Rundle returns to the piano singing “tears like the leaves fall down, scenes from your table, we’re moving the body now.” A relationship defined in death and disaster. The longing to believe the last words said, the personifying of objects to remain close, the realization that death is finite. The “if only I could keep her, I’m still a little girl that needs you one more time” strikes later in the song as Rundle deconstructs the promise of always being held. She builds in depth and volume with a final minor piano chord. 

In “The Company” Rundle shows her mastery of acoustic instrumentation with static string slides and harrowing octaves that will leave anyone who has ever struggled in understanding themselves needing a moment. The way in which Rundle explains this dichotomy between the soul and the self is ornate. Singing that “the company” and later “the melody” she keeps is “the center of all [her] troubles.” Self-reflection is an eminent theme.  

Rundle describes “Dancing Man” perfectly as “a perfect sort of memory of love that maybe doesn’t actually exist in this world so it’s like being in a snow globe moment and so I go inside the idea of the song, move in slow motion.” The song itself is intimate and esoteric. The tempo leaves time for contemplation and encapsulation of sound that proverbially echoes within Rundles snow globe of a world she has created. 

Alternating between piano and acoustic guitar throughout her performance, Rundle eviscerates the strings in “Razor’s Edge” and “Citadel.” Rundle’s wordplay and poeticisms are on display in “Citadel.” A song about the fortress built when she was “bone by piece, I’m bricking me over / tier by tear, I wave to you.” With a lilt in tone often picked up in 90s alternative or grunge anthems, the way in which Rundle utilizes her voice to stress the fragility of the words in contradiction with the idea of a fortress is evermore conveyed. 

 Spiritual contemplation resides “In My Afterlife.” Lines such as “someone forgot to put the sterling on my brow” and “my nearest keeper, a distant star there was laughing,” solidify the desolate loneliness of life after death after life, if there is such a thing. The cognizance of the ferryman and having no one to pay her toll in the afterlife while leaning on a figment of imagination, the body of gas and light being the closest to life she will get now.  

In an encore, “Pump Organ Song” is misunderstanding, commitment in the face of destruction and the ever-existing question of endings. The silence, the codependency, the culmination of years, months, weeks, days and seconds in a space and time together. “We looked light as a feather, but silence is heavy” speaks to the masquerade of happiness and compatibility in the face of other; strangers that don’t seem as strange.  

Leaving as she entered, claps and whistles abound, Rundle cements herself as an observational conduit to human experience and emotion