(written by Islander)
After a run of short releases beginning in 2011, the Bay Area band Ominous Ruin released a debut album in 2021 via Willowtip Records, Amidst Voices That Echo in Stone, that quickly attracted a lot of enthusiastic attention. As our own DGR wrote in his NCS review, “The band’s sound is one of multiple extreme genres in all-out combat with each other, fully unloading from the hyperactive Tech Death scene even as it drains the arsenal from a very Brutal Death inspired segment as well.” But he also highlighted the even further progressions that the album included as it moved forward, becoming more labyrinthine, more ominous, more unpredictable.
And now Ominous Ruin are returning, again on the Willowtip label, with their sophomore album Requiem. No less technically impressive or brutally bludgeoning than their debut, it nevertheless represents a noticeable evolution, providing an even more expansive array of sensations and moods (including ambient and acoustic passages) in a way that makes the album even more emotionally involving — and mind-bending — than their first one.
This was evident in the first video/single off the album, “Staring Into the Abysm,” and today we have further compelling evidence in our premiere of Ominous Ruin‘s video for the song “Eternal“.
Photo by Catalino (“Kitty”) Alvarez
Willowtip has described Requiem as “a powerful exploration of the human psyche, the ravages of time, and the inevitable descent into oblivion”, and as the product of a dark time in the band’s lives as a result of personal turmoil.
And yet, although that first song “Staring Into the Abysm” had an unexpected digression and ended in a way that was eerie and chilling — an “inevitable slip into empty nothingness, as entropy consumes reality” (to quote the band) — it was also dazzling and dizzying. As we wrote at the time, “the overarching mood of all the head-spinning fretwork machinations in the song is wild, even joyously demented, but also weirdly off-planet, like the ecstasies of aliens.”
And now we come to the video for “Eternal” — a genuine musical kaleidoscope. The opening riff alone is a hybrid of thudding and clanging primitiveness and freakishly swirling exuberance, beautifully matched by the drum variations, and the opening growls and screams of new vocalist Crystal Rose are equally eye-popping.
Fingers and limbs fly fast, like demented swallows in flight, rapidly following a path of sharp angles and swirling curves as Crystal Rose barks, screams, and snarls the words with equal speed but greater bellicosity.
The band spin their kaleidoscope in other ways too, spearing the music with bursts of shrill, strange, and disturbing dissonance that will put teeth on edge and erupting in swarm-like frenzies, but also suddenly shifting into a subdued and mysterious bass-and-guitar duet and continuing to punctuate the bizarre (but surgically executed) fretwork freakouts with thuggish atonal blows and sudden stops and starts. And Harley Blandford accents all those hair-pin turns with jaw-dropping drum variations.
It’s one thing to listen to this brutal tech-death spectacle, which manages to be catchy as well as too much to comprehend in just one run-through, but it’s another to actually see the performers pulling it off — and that’s exactly what the video gives you a chance to do. So hang onto your heads if you can and press Play now:
OMINOUS RUIN is:
Alex Bacey: Guitars
Mitch Yoesle: Bass
Crystal Rose: Vocals
Harley Blandford: Drum
Joel Guernsey: Guitars
Requiem was mixed and mastered by Alex Bacey, and it features striking cover art by Pär Olofsson. Willowtip will release it on CD, vinyl LP, and digital formats on May 9th. They’re accepting orders now:
PRE-ORDER:
Willowtip: https://bit.ly/requiem-willowtip
Bandcamp: https://ominousruin.bandcamp.com/album/requiem
OMINOUS RUIN:
https://linktr.ee/ominousruin
https://www.facebook.com/ominousruin