Watch Emma Ruth Rundle Cover Kate Bush’s “Running Up That Hill” With Mastodon, YOB, Old Man Gloom Members
Two Minutes To Late Night is back with another all-star metal cover. Hosted by Jordan Olds as “Gwarsenio Hall” and affiliated with the Brooklyn venue Saint Vitus, the series has been getting one-off bands together for some pretty fun covers during quarantine. A couple months back there was a “Weird Al” Yankovic rendition, and just last week Sleigh Bells’ Alexis Krauss led a faithful performance of Guns N’ Roses’ “Rocket Queen.” And today, they’re back with another one.
This time around, Emma Ruth Rundle leads a band featuring Olds, Mastodon’s Bill Kelliher, YOB’s Aaron Rieseberg, and Old Man Gloom’s Santos Montano. Each Two Minutes To Late Night cover usually comes with a message, and usually there’s an effort to raise donations for musicians during the pandemic, but this week they’re urging fans to instead redirect funds to protestor bail efforts:
Hello friends, we decided to release this video on schedule even though our country is in turmoil because we wanted to honor the hard work of our guest musicians and to give our fans a respite from the horrors of the fascist police state. In lieu of donating to our Patreon, we ask you to consider making a donation to the protestor bail funds for your local city (we’ve listed some of the major ones below). Please take a moment to acknowledge our many friends who cannot enjoy any kind of video right now. Black Lives Matter. Rest in power George Floyd and the many other victims of systemic oppression.
As for the cover: The group got together to reimagine Kate Bush’s immortal “Running Up That Hill” as a metal song. Rundle — who, in bands like Marriages, has a way of singing hauntingly over heavy-leaning music — delivers the vocals in a style close to Bush’s original. But the music underneath is transformed, with both the main synth line and tumbling percussion of “Running Up That Hill” lending themselves surprisingly well to reinterpretation as distorted metal guitars and thunderous drums. Check it out, and revisit Bush’s version, below.