Burial Hordes return with their latest album Ruin. It has been five years since the Greek blackened death metal outfit released their last album The Termination Thesis, an album which is equally brutal as it is hauntingly beautiful (well in blackened death metal kind of way) with dissonant atmospheric passages contrasting the more typical ferocity associated with the genre. With Ruin did the band continue to explore these melancholic passages further or did have they became more ferocious?
The album answers this question immediately as it comes tearing in from the void and rarely lets up for the entire run time. On the occasion you are not being pounded into dust (which as I said is rare), sinister chord structures are allowed the ring, like a sadistic moment of clarity before the next wave of devastation arrives. With the last album The Termination Thesis there is a melodic undertone, even though it is slight. However with Ruin you are instead engulfed in wave after wave of filth. The rage is palpable, best highlighted by a vocal performance which is so guttural and so raw, it adds a real sense of vileness that further adds to the unsettling chasm, which deepens with each beat.
The music falls between the murky blackened death metal chaos of Altarage’s The Approaching Roar and the discordant majesty of Deathspell Omega The Synarchy Of Molten Bones. This though leads to why the album does not quite reach the heights of either of the mentioned albums. By traversing between these two equally macabre styles it sounds like a twisted amalgamation and as such loses that vital essence of originality which for example the aforementioned bands achieve. The styles which influence Ruin most prominently are as extreme as metal can get, they demand to be taken to the furthest reaches of possibility, if not then the music will unfortunately not stand out amongst a wealth of bands within the two provinces of musical torture mentioned. As Burial Hordes do not pursue the influences to the extreme, Ruin may suffer from getting lost amongst the pack.
Leaving an impression that Ruin is unworthy of your time though is a false impression, I really want to be clear of that. There is not one single bad song, not a single song for which you are reaching for the skip button. If you want face-melting, bone-pummelling metal, this is the album for you. There is as much subtly on offer as a Lovecraftian elder god tearing into our world from the void, laying waste to all of civilisation. Ruin is an incredibly solid album, but frustratingly rarely reaches the spectacular.
Released on the 9th of June through Transcending Obscurity Records.
For Fans of: Altarage, Deathspell Omega, Dead Congregation and Ulcerate
