Ruins - Front the Final Foes

Genre: Black Metal
Year: 2009
Country: Australia
Tracklist:

1.	Breath Of Void	05:30
2.	The Sum Of Your Loss	05:27
3.	Cult Rapture	04:50
4.	Annihilate	06:28
5.	Front The Final Foes	03:50
6.	Hallways Of The Always	05:35
7.	Keeping This Crown	05:26
8.	With These Winged Words	07:37
Total playing time		44:43

Download (rapidshare)
Like the bone gnawing local devil, Tasmania's Ruins are a savage beast. With their no-frills approach to black/death metal this duo makes quite an impact. Within mere seconds 'Front The Final Foes' brings up associations with Celtic Frost's 'Monotheist'. Given how brilliant that album is, this cannot be a particularly bad thing. Ruins have a similarly low-end, crunchy guitar sound and a knack for pummelling double bass driven midtempo parts. Moreover, Alex Pope eschews the more conventional growls and screams in favour of a gruff vocal approach akin to Tom G Warrior, complete with the occasional "Uhh".

Contrary to the Swiss phenomenon, Ruins do like their fair share of blasting though, which is not entirely strange given that drummer Dave Haley also plays in Psycroptic. This, and the inclusion of several cold, Satyricon-like riffs, brings a lot of versatility into the mix. Although the drums tend to dominate, the overall production of 'Front The Final Foes' is far from bad. It all sounds particularly powerful. Then again, having Haley's precise and forceful drum work pushed so far to the front of the mix is anything but punishment.

'Front The Final Foes' offers forty five minutes of highly enjoyable, direct music without any unnecessary evils like guitar solos or keyboards. Each of the eight songs is very good in its own right, but the album could have benefitted from one or two real standout tracks. Nevertheless, given this record a listen is definitely recommendable.