The last effort from this Australian horde was reviewed not long since on these pages, with it only getting UK release in early 2009 however this is the first time I have run into Ruins. Reading the back cover of the promo CD, it is somewhat surprising to see Ruins is made up of two main members; Alex and Dave – I actually thought using your real name (unless you’re lucky enough to have a tr00 Norwegian name) was punishable by death in BM circles, but Dave is better known for his work with death metal acts Psycroptic, Aborted and Nervecell so there you go.
‘Front The Final Foes’ is a war-mongering title if ever I heard one, and certainly on first and rather lazy listen this appears to be all about knocking us over with bold, brazen riffs that have the almighty swagger of Satyricon coupled with those rather peed-off “Ugh!”-s that are anything but understated. Opener ‘Breath Of Void’ certainly gets your attention and does it’s job of drawing the listener into the album proper while ‘The Sum Of Your Loss’ keeps hold of it with its mean chorus where slow, driving guitars give out a cruel and merciless feel, crushing you beneath its sheer heaviness.
There’s quite a nice flow to this album. There’s certainly a nihilistic streak trailing through the music and the tone becomes gradually more sinister over time. The black’n’roll bravado of the opener has dispersed by the time we reach ‘Cult Rapture’ and with a spoken intro taken from William Blake's ‘Auguries of Innocence’ it takes on a more bleak aura of pessimism and darkness. That deathly orientation does come across in the drumming on this one in particular and Dave lets out a militant onslaught of blastbeats. At this point I’m thinking that some of the transitions from the slow, atmospheric passages to more furious speedy parts aren’t as seamless as they could be but nevertheless it’s not a bad effort.
The vocals on ‘Annihilate’ sound rather menacing, having that slow and pronounced style to them, while guitars sound quite hypnotic and reside in deathly squalor and the final few track seem to descend into disorder especially on the rather dark and curiously titled ‘Hallways Of The Always’ which has some unconventional shifts in timing and lends itself to a sinister kind of unrest, while ‘With These Winged Words’ takes flight into chaos before slowly trailing out.
This album was definitely a grower, and in places the sound is reasonably accessible with the first few tracks sounding like they may appeal to those who don’t strictly do badger-faced metal (don’t worry Spenny, I won’t be sending you their next album to review!) It’s an enjoyable and relatively short album that hints at better things to come.
http://www.myspace.com/ruinsblackmetal
