Emma Ruth Rundle & Thou – May Our Chambers Be Full

Stemming out of an offer fromRoadburn Festival organizer Walter Hoeijmakers, mutual acquaintances, and a shared love of each others output,May Our Chambers Be Fullis the first recorded document of collaboration betweenEmma Ruth RundleandThou. While their solo material seems on its face to be quite disparate, both groups have spent their respective careers lurking at the outer boundaries of the heavy metal scene, the artists having more in common with DIY punk and its spiritual successor, grunge.

May Our Chambers Be Fullstraddles a similar, very fine line both musically and thematically. WhileEmma Ruth Rundlesstandard fare is a blend of post-rock-infused folk music, and Thou is typically known for its downtuned, doomy sludge, the conjoining of the two artists has created a record more in the vein of the early 90s Seattle sound and later 90s episodes of Alternative Nation, while still retaining much of the artists core identities. Likewise, the lyrical content of the album is a marriage of mental trauma, existential crises, and the ecstatic tradition of the expressionist dance movement. Excessive sorrow laughs. Excessive joy weeps. Melodic, melancholic, heavy, visceral.

The visual art accompanying this work was created in collaboration with preeminent New Orleans photographerCraig Mulcahy. The faceless, genderless models are meant to emphasize this pervasive state of ambiguity and emotional vacillation, the images falling somewhere between modern high fashion and classical Renaissance.

Tracklisting

1. Killing Floor
2. Monolith
3. Out of Existence
4. Ancestral Recall 03:54
5. Magickal Cost
6. Into Being
7. The Valley