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For Ruin: Last light

03/11/09 || Euthanatos

Ah, the luck of the Irish. Hasn’t gotten anything to do with this, apart from the band being Irish, but I though it was a great way to start a review. For Ruin. Heard of them? Yeah, me neither. Here’s the information the Encyclopedia Metallum gives us;

“For Ruin began as a solo project of John Murphy, who recorded the split and the two subsequent demos as such using material written written as early as 1998. In 2005 a full band was formed in order to play live and record the Obsidian EP, and the debut album was recorded as a full band by the second incarnation of the lineup – Melodic Black/Death Metal”.

Okay, good to know, or not so much, as anything with “melodic” in front of it has a tendency to be terrible. Luckily, For Ruin isn’t terrible at all, and calling it Melodic Black Metal is a bit of a stretch, although, granted, I don’t know how else to label them.

We first get an instrumental, “Enlightened”, which starts off mellow, and then moves on to a galloping riff and some nice guitar duets. That merges unto “Care of the Dead”, which incidentally is a great song name. And with that song, we get an overall feel of what For Ruin is really about. There is very little actual black metal on this, and some sort of melodic death metal would really be the best way to describe it. Fit this somewhere on your At The Gates/Early Dark Tranquility shelf, and you would be doing it justice. It isn’t as good as those bands, but still, it’s what it sounds like.

The music here is very guitar-driven, particularly guitar melodies with duets, triplets, octets, big tits, what have you. Everything else ends up paling in comparison, particularly the drums and bass, which are pretty much your run of the mill, not bad, but typical and average metal cup of tea. The vocals are worthy of note, they’re not particularly memorable, and I could compare it to a dozen other singers, but that’s it’s only flaw. John is confident enough with his harsh growl, and with so many shitty singers around, we can let lack of originality stay.

The song-writing is really the main feature of “Last Light”, I do think the guitar-centric approach is very fitting for this style, and there are some good ideas all around. Check out songs like “Solace” and “Decline”, there are some great riffs and melodies there. There is also a really, really cool instrumental called “Crawl”. It’s fucking intense and might be the best song on the entire album.

It seems that Ireland now has the balls the Gothenburg area used to have. As crazy as the Irish are, I like to think of this as them getting piss-drunk on beer, hopping on a precarious boat/ship, sailing to Sweden, kicking the shit out of everyone (while screaming FOR RUIN), cutting off their balls with dirty knives, and heading back to their island all happy and covered in blood.

And if that mental image is the one that sticks with you after reading this review, then, well, I believe my job is done, and For Ruin is ready to be heard.

The cover:

-Your island? You mean Ireland?
-Aye. It’s mine.

Information
Released: 2009
Label: Sentinel Records
Website: www.forruin.com
Band
John Murphy: vocals, guitars
Drew Myers: guitars
Peter Lawlor: bass
Pete Alcorn: drums

Tracklist
01. Enlightened (Instrumental)
02. Care Of The Dead
03. Decline
04. In Suffering
05. Solace
06. Recoil
07. Crawl (Instrumental)
08. Deluge
09. Cold Call
10. Elysium

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