Unfathomable Ruination – Decennium Ruinae
Release Date: 28th May 2021
Label: Willowtip Records
Bandcamp
Genre: Head-smashing technical death metal.
FFO: Defeated Sanity, Cytotoxin, Slamming Death Metal bands.
Review By: Ben Harris-Hayes
OK, so knowing what London-based Unfathomable Ruination are all about; I put on my big boy pants and prepared myself for another swirling, tremolo picked, blastbeat fest of crushing death metal…and unsurprisingly, that’s what I got served!
This 4 track EP contains 3 new tracks of razor-edged, hyper-smashing death metulz and a re-recording of an older track, ‘Suspended in Entropic Dissipation’.
Kicking off with the re-recorded track, we’re presented with a chugging slamfest of blastbeats (hammer, bomb, gravity and your garden variety traditional types), ever-shifting tempos and feels, mixed together with a myriad of guitar silliness that would make most metal players scratch their heads.
The subsweep/sonic boom in this track actively made me laugh out loud because it was so stupidly loud…but in a fun way! My sub speaker definitely lapped it up with glee…not sure my neighbours did though!
One thing I’ve found with coming back to doing reviews after a long time out is that us scribes seem to get bad sounding MP3’s to review and this really bugs me because sometimes it doesn’t reflect on the final recording the band wanted.
I went in search of the same opening track on YouTube and listened there, with it sounding much better, production wise, online. So, come on, record labels…give us the good stuff, eh? It only hurts the bands otherwise because we end up moaning about the production being muddy and blurry, when that’s perhaps not the case.
Anywho, I had to go back to the MP3’s for the first of the 3 new tracks the band have unleashed, ‘A Withered Embrace’.
It’s another palm-muted, blastbeat-driven death metal chug-fest which had my foot tapping, when the band held onto a tempo for more than 2 bars…haha!
Now, I get the whole ADHD metal style that has been in fashion for ages now, where you cram as many riffs and changes into the song as you can…but I just sometimes feel that it IS ok to just ease back a bit sometimes to give the groovier riffs a chance to breathe before you beat us in the face again, you know? Do I sound like an old man for saying that? Probably, but I don’t care!
The third slice here gives a great song title in ‘The Great Contaminator’ and there is no cocking about as it launches straight in with more blasting and d-beat fun, soaked in pinched harmonics and sewer-level guttural vocals from Ben Wright. It’s another journey through lots of tempo shifts, changes in groove and delivery.
The fourth and final track, ‘Disciples of Pestilence’ on the new EP greets us with a slick clean guitar intro and some moody reverb-soaked loveliness before the d-beat fun kicks in again. I really liked this track because it showed a wealth of songwriting chops with the band not being afraid to change up the frenetic pace with a mid-tempo, timing signature-filled salvo.
As the track moved on, there were a lot of quite ridiculous shifts in feel and pace throughout the 5 minutes of this track which made me smile. It was one of those tracks that felt like it was twice as long because of the amount of content. Oh, and a big thumbs up to the off-kilter chugging final section of this track which allowed me to bang my head without giving myself an aneurysm.
Now, I am going to sound old here…but I have to say again that sometimes I just want a proper hook to hold onto, you know? I want a riff that I will hum in the shower a few days later and sadly, it wasn’t there for me on this release. Despite multiple listens, I just didn’t find a riff that made me go “Ahhh, that’s a cracking bit” until the last track.
This is NOT to say this release is bad in any way at all…far from it.
It’s a crushing landslide of new death metal shenanigans that the modern DM/Slam fan will lap up like a saucer of contagious milk…and I bet the band crush it live too. And yet maybe my old man DM sensibilities want a particular thing or perhaps I’m missing the point here, because it didn’t grab me as I hoped.
I also feel that any DM release I hear is always up against Cryptopsy’s ‘None So Vile’, which remains my fave DM album by a long shot.
Perhaps it’s unfair I use that yardstick as a measuring tool these days, but I’ve got to go back to my aforementioned requirement for hummable licks and moments; which for me, weren’t quite there on this release.
One final thing I have to reiterate was the quality I had to review, because I found the final track on the EP on YouTube as an official video which sounded TONS better than the recordings I got, which only enhanced my favoured track on this EP. So, get that in your ears.
So, it’s final scores on the doors time…
The air-drumming, DM loving git that resides in me gives this a solid 3/5 because the changes in pace, timing and feel kept me interested, with the final track being a particular highlight here.
…and the metaller in me who wants a smidge more hooks to vibe with gives this 2/5 because there were some nice moments but not enough for me to go raving about to a friend.
Mathematically, it’s a final score of…
(2.5 / 5)
