Ruins – ‘Place Of No Pity’

The name of Tasmanian devils (sic) Ruins may be unfamiliar to many people outside the southern hemisphere, but that should be about to change soon, thanks to the international release of this, their fourth full length studio album.

And a bloody fine slice of blackened metal it is – melodic yet hard-hitting with a dark soul, more brooding than brutal, in an eerily sinister way that verges on being almost progressive but at the same time manages to stay true to its death metal roots.

Opener ‘Inhabit The Twilight’ is built on a rolling riff that rushes along at a breakneck speed but retains the dark, underlying broodiness which characterizes the album’s overall feel – something echoed very firmly on ‘Death Lends The Ultimate Touch’, which brings in the epic mid-section, its beautiful intermingling of majestic doom and apocalyptic thrash riffs summarizing another key aspect of the musical sound which makes this opus stand out, in a very positive and affirming way, from a lot of the more experimental but ultimately unfulfilling (and therefore unimpressive) dross cluttering up the scene at the moment.

‘Winter’s Will’ is dark and nihilistic in its aural assault, while the title track just takes the album to a whole new level, mixing everything that has gone before in terms of tempestuous, swirling riffs underpinned by bleak doomy basslines. ‘Desolation’ is therefore slightly disappointing in that it is a more traditional DM offering, but is nonetheless as effective as anything that has come before, before it gives way to the blastbeat-induced brutality of the vicious ‘Let Them Perish’, with its swirling firestorm of a riff, which, while totally brilliant as a single entity, serves merely as a precursor for the awesome ‘Oath’, which kicks off with a slightly predictable thrash riff but quickly evolves into a majestic tour-de-force of hedonistic old school death/thrash metal with a 21st groove sensibility.

9/10

Tracklist:
1 Inhabit The Twilight
2 A Lesson In Ruthlessness
3 Death Lends The Ultimate Touch
4 Winters Will
5 Place Of No Pity
6 Desolation
7 Let Them Perish
8 Oath
9 Merciless

‘Place Of No Pity’ is released on Listenable Records on November 26th in the UK and Europe and on November 29th in the USA.

http://www.facebook.com/ruins666

http://www.myspace.com/ruinsblackmetal

http://www.listenable.net

About Mark Ashby

no longer planetmosh staff