STONEHENGE

This is a particularly brutal tour de force of the Ruins landscape circa 88-89. Almost every track features a corrosively distorted, heavy bass sound and a drum sound that cracks and thumps through your skull like a marauding band of medieval brutes. The violence in these songs is sometimes chilling, evoking images of harsh and bloody battles, epic journeys through impossible-to-survive conditions, or any other such grueling and costly predicament. But not every song is so dark, and several of the ones that are still captivate with their beauty and/or horror. The album is bookended by two amazing and crushing journeys, "Big Head," and "Infect." The former is a great composition shocked by a lightning fast climax, and the latter has one of the nastiest, growlingest opening themes I have heard. "Thebes" is close behind these in its volcanic power (but maybe this one is more like a slow and terrifying ooze than a galloping ambush). "Hail" is a welcome oasis of simplicity, and "Holebones" is one of Ruins' rare melodic rockers, with a charming vocal delivery. The darker tunes have the shredding and screaming vocals that are the trademark of earlier Ruins releases. The sheer volume of tracks makes this a hard one to listen to straight through, but the quality of the selections make it worth having. A good step for anyone wanting to wade in deeper than "Burning Stone," "Hyderomastgroningem," or "Symphonica."

Occasionally, I get to visit a little used CD store which is around an hour away from where I live. A lot of the time, they don't have very much interesting stuff, but imagine my surprise while looking through their selection one day and finding this Ruins album there. Naturally, I absolutely had to pick it up, since I was just beginning into my (still going) Tatsuya Yoshida craze.

I hadn't heard much by the band before this, though I had heard enough to know what to expect. I definitely got what I expected, and almost 70 minutes of it. Furious, complex, incredible drumming and fuzzy bass, along with vocals in Yoshida's made up language. In other words, an amazing album from my point of view. A warning to those of you who aren't as interested in the noisier side of things, though - this is definitely not the Ruins album for you (in fact, why are you listening to Ruins if you're not a fan of the noisier side of things?). It's one of the more intense albums by the band I've listened to thus far, and it works well if you're into that kind of thing. Yoshida is probably the undisputed king of Japanese drummers, and he has an unnatural talent for finding amazing bassists/others to play around him. Kazuyoshi Kimoto is definitely no exception to this - he's such an agile bass player, able to keep up with all of the frantic twists and turns presented in the compositions on the album.

If you're a fan of bizarre, energetic music, you would do well to check Ruins out - this may not be the best starting point, but if you want to jump right in to the madness, then it would work incredibly well for that. I can't recommend this album enough - I'll give it a 4-star rating, though only because I realize that Ruins isn't exactly most people's cup of tea - eventually this might move up to a 5.

So far I've reviewed Ruins' three shorter early EPs. Well here goes... a full hour of their brutality.

The first ten seconds are a good enough idea of what you're in for with thrashing drums and shrieking to the max! But if you can look past it you can see some good musicianship - the guitar work Big Head around 3 minutes in for example (just before more shrieking). Many tracks follow the mix of interesting technical passages and outright brutal thrashing and pained vocals.

At times the heavy distorted bass gives you that funny feeling... you know the one. I think. Kibbutz is a good example! And there's also some fairly punk rock elements to some of the tracks. For me Fallout is one of the better tracks on the album for this reason.

After 16 minutes of the thrashy tracks, October is a sudden gear change, with a slow and sludgy bassline, almost quite MDK-like. It picks up the pace fairly quickly though, with some excellent drumming, but still a style of vocals reminiscent of Magma. A very good track with a mix of a lot of their styles, but mainly for the drumming, which continues brilliantly on the next track Hexagon as well.

Holebones is also quite a punk style track. It would be drastically overdoing it to call it melodic, but there is something to it that's not just the thrashing of previous tracks!

For Hail, we're back to that incredibly heavy bassline. And on the steamed copy of the album I had access to, also a much clearer sound. Unlike other tracks where the drumming is the highlight, this is all about the bass rhythm. Definitely one to check out. Seems to be a one off though, with the title track and Thebbes then returning to the mix of thrash and sludge.

From here, the final run of tracks also appear on the third Ruins EP which I've previously reviewed, albeit with a different bassist. B.U.G. is a very interesting track in its absolute simplicity for most of it - a single bass note and drum hit and a slightly changing tempo - and some stop-start faster paced elements as well. On Ripples, which was one of my favourites on the EP, we get the addition of a violin, which certainly adds a new dimension to the track and I think makes it one of the best on this album too.

Somewhere around 2.5 stars for me, some good examples of the less accessible side of a genre - but hard to say it would appeal to anyone other than fans!