(Below we present DGR‘s review of a new album by California-based Ominous Ruin in advance of its release this coming Friday by Willowtip Records.)
Is it possible for a band to do a complete lateral in their music and yet feel as if they are starting from the same spot they stepped away from? Bay Area tech-death group Ominous Ruin have been around a little over ten years now, yet it sure does feel like with their new album Requiem the group have stepped out to soft-relaunch themselves.
You’d almost never guess it based off the gap of close to four years between releases – and a lot can happen in four years, mind – but it’s as if the Ominous Ruin crew effectively never stopped. Instead, they just did a step to the side and started over again with about the same bar in quality that they established on their album Amidst Voices That Echo In Stone as the starting point. The result is interesting, less cross-pollination among three different subsections of the tome of death metal and instead a laser-like focus on one particular chapter, the tech-death section.
photos by Catalino (“Kitty”) Alvarez
Requiem is Ominous Ruin‘s first album with vocalist Crystal Rose taking up the reins. This is a brave first act taking over from someone who had spent Ominous Ruin‘s last album getting more intense and nuanced as the release went on. Requiem‘s marquee attraction then at least owes some credit to the fact that Crystal proves to be an equally fitting replacement.
The music on Requiem requires a brutally sharp approach to the vocal work, and that is exactly what is delivered. It’s hard to go toe-to-toe with the show offs manning the guitar front, but as songs are rattled off like C&C machines factory-printing parts, so the vocals are as punctual as ever – whether it be the bulk-mileage-earning low growls or a whip strike of a high scream that springs into existence whenever a line needs a little extra emphasis. Requiem is in solid hands on the new cast members front. But what does that mean for the music then?
On the first few listens of Requiem it becomes clear that Ominous Ruin are aiming for a game in a different ballpark than where they were on their first full-length. No longer are we descending through multiple levels of brutal death metal along the way to our tech-death showcase, we’re simply beginning with the tech-death showcase and that is where we will be staying for the whole of Requiem‘s run time.
It’s noticeable that the Ominous Ruin crew have had roots in bands like Continuum and Inanimate Existence as Requiem delivers unto Willowtip Records a solid slab of death metal that peppered its way up and down the coast of California in the mid-2010s. Instead of an unstoppable brutality as the main force by which the album gets by, Ominous Ruin is very sleek and has a sniper’s delivery on each of its subjects. They are light on their feet this time around with the way they hand out towering riff after riff. The drumming never seems to stop, holding on with a grasp tight enough to bend a steel pole, and, as is required by the tech-death genre (otherwise the bouncer tosses you out of the club), everyone gets a pretty big shot at the spotlight.
When things are as intricate and tied together as the material on Requiem there’s little room to not play as if the instrument is a pure extension of the self. There’s at least one agent out there eyeing this troupe for an act in Cirque De Soliel given how acrobatic Ominous Ruin have to be with what happens within the borders of Requiem.
While it may be an unintentional restart for the band, Ominous Ruin do stretch their wings a little bit on Requiem. They have new sonic pathways opened up with this release and they take every opportunity to explore them.
Beyond the five-piece instrumentation the group also add some light keyboard touches at one point and play with a whole lot of guitar effects mid-way into the album. Some of the stuff happening within the guitar solo of “Divergent Anomaly” will likely turn heads the first couple of go ’rounds if not just for the “what the hell was that?” factor after you’d just gotten used to the continual bulldozer that is their overall sound. When it spills into the following track “Fractal Abhorrence”, you’d almost be forgiven for viewing those two as one complete ten-plus-minute heavyweight of a song, especially with the key break opening things up.
Ominous Ruin take some wild swings on Requiem to keep each song a distinct experience as well. The defining element of a particular song should not be the gimmickry of “oh that’s where they did the weird thing” with no descriptor of the music around it. Ominous Ruin land about a 94% hit rate on that front though there’s definitely one song later in Requiem where the band get anonymous in some of the riffwork as they stretch the song “Architect Of Undoing” well into the eight-minute range, save for a segment where they are plucking the absolute fuck out of the strings on one of their instruments and letting that thing vibrate hard enough that it could measure on the Richter Scale. It is wildly inventive in parts and then reaches just a little too hard to keep the mechanism moving.
“Staring Into The Abysm” on the other foot may as well be a grind song. It purports to be over three minutes but the actual death metal song within it is only about a minute and a half – serving as a coda to the prog-metal epic that was “Architect Of Undoing” before it. The song shifts from closing act to the song before it, to spoken-word part, to quiet ambience, before ceding ground to the closing song on Requiem. As mentioned before, when Ominous Ruin were going to take wild swings to help keep themselves from descending into faceless blur territory, this is some of the journeying work they go about. It’s not all tightly controlled cacophony – just mostly if we were to use album openers “Seeds Of Entropy” and “Eternal” as prime examples.
Once again we walk away from an Ominous Ruin album both impressed and intrigued for the future of the band. We had thought previously with Amidst Voices That Echo In Stone that the Ominous Ruin cohort were showing serious potential as they had already unleashed one ass-kicker of an album with that one. Requiem is of a similar vein in that regard: Ominous Ruin are demonstrating that they are a class of their own and already leagues-in with the modern tech-death scene. This is an album that pulls and grasps from so many different areas with lightning speed like a burglar just after crashing his car through the front door of a jewelry store. Everything within the tech-death sphere is fair game here and Ominous Ruin treat it as such.
There’s a sense of both familiarity and crazed experimentation happening on Requiem, and yes, as before, the potential for Ominous Ruin to explode into something far grander is there. Requiem is already (re)laying the groundwork for such a thing, and now that they’ve shown they can compete with the rapid-fire vocals and technical death metal fretboard tap-dance and place high on the chart, they can sprint into something much more vast.
Requiem is a blunt and solid-as-a-mountain release, dense as could be expected and containing enough to discover that you’ll be searching out the ole’ musical mining helmet once again to go spelunking. Ominous Ruin move fast here, good luck hanging on.
The album will be released on May 9th. Willowtip is hosting a Bandcamp listening party for the full album today (May 6th) at 7:00 PM PDT. RSVP here.
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