Valkyrian Music

Ruins
Place of No Pity
Released: November 2012
Black Metal/ Blackened Thrash Metal
Released via Listenable Records

‘Place of No Pity’ is the fourth album from the Australian black metal band Ruins.

After the melodic intro, ‘Inhabit The Twilight’ reveals its true colors as an interesting mix of black metal guitar rhythms, death metal-style drumming and clean Celtic Frost -esque vocals. There’s even hint of thrash metal added making for a complex mixture of styles. ‘A Lesson In Ruthlessness’ features guitar structures and muted sound atmospheres similar to current Satyricon.

‘Death Lends The Ultimate Touch’ is slower and more melodic in nature. The vocals have this haunting feel to them which works well with the melodic guitars and steady drumming. Yet it’s the atmospheric, dark ambient style part towards the end of the track which cements its position as one of highlights of the album. Similar things can be said about the next track ‘Winters Will’; though this time the guitars are more droning and the vocals sound even more creepy. Speaking of the vocals, one thing that’s unusual about most of the tracks on here is that there’s actually have very few vocalized parts on them. It’s almost as though the band were striving towards creating an instrumental album but then they changed their minds and decided to add some limited vocals during the first few minutes of each track.

Other noteworthy songs include: the title melodic track ‘Place of No Pity’ which places the band firmly in the blackened thrash metal category and the eerie and melancholic ‘Desolation’ which is one of the few tracks on here that features vocals throughout. Then there’s ‘Oath’ which picks up the pace towards the latter half of the track mostly as a result of the drums.

Overall Ruins have a very unique sound and this album takes some getting used to. However if you’re not afraid to try something a bit different and you like any of the current works of Satyricon then I would recommend giving ‘Place of No Pity’ a spin.

3.5/5

Iza Raittila

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This entry was posted on 24th October 2012 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Review with tags Black Metal, Celtic Frost, Death Metal, Listenable Records, Satyricon. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.