Building off the strengths of their critically acclaimed works, POISON RUIN return with their new album, Hymns From the Hills. The Philadelphia Punk band have developed their signature approach to grim mythmaking and scythe-swinging aggression in bold new directions, offering up a new body of songs that strike one as equal parts natural, undeniably of this world, and phantasmal.
The band’s vision has grown substantially, pushing well past the tales of peasants and serfs that stood as allegories for contemporary alienation in their previous work. On this newest offering, their previous stories of toil and dispossession are revealed to be but one chapter etched upon a bleaker tapestry- One populated by spirits traversing sunless deserts and wilted hillsides, demonic torture objects limning the edges of the psyche, bodies transfigured into Luciferian snakes, Sadean prisoners bound to the screaming silence of abandoned castle towers. The record is at once a forceful restatement of POISON RUIN’s trademark sound and a departure from it- The crackling, cassette-dubbed darkness and crushing rhythms listeners have become accustomed to are buttressed by a carefully sculpted mosaic of new textures, from flourishes of Killing Joke hacksaw primitivism and blast-beats worthy of the Relapse catalogue number to crisp analog synth lines and ambient serenades reminiscent of Scott Walker and The Durutti Column. Like a serpent moving ever outward with spiraling circularity, Hymns From the Hills expands POISON RUIN’s sonic landscape in imaginative new directions while maintaining its center of gravity firmly in the band’s already established mythos.
Hymns From the Hills is meticulously composed. Much like the rest of POISON RUIN’s body of work, this LP was self-recorded without the use of professional studio equipment. To meet the greater sonic demands of Hymns From the Hills, however, mastermind Mac Kennedy relocated to a private practice space, retiring from his previous routine of squeezing in tracking sessions around the rare moments that the band’s shared practice space happened to be vacant. “Having added time to breathe and really get things right felt crucial this time,” he remarks. “The stress of having to work quickly and at chaotic intervals used to feel productive, in that it instilled a sort of rough, energetic ethos into the recordings, but I began to feel that those working habits were blocking me from pursuing certain ideas that required a more measured, methodical approach.” To best serve the record’s grander ambitions, the band enlisted the mixing prowess of Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Career Suicide) and the mastering of Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Trapped Under Ice, Cavalera, Integrity), who helped to elevate the record’s teeming variety of sounds to new heights of self-assured fidelity. Kennedy lent a second hand to the mixing process, splicing in grittier tape recorded segments in order to maintain a certain tonal continuity with the band’s previous work, creating a rich structure of unconventional frictions, crystalline flashes of polish ripping through abysses of hissing low end only to shatter against the whipping sting of rusted chains moments later.
Lyrically, Hymns From The Hills extends both the cynicism and the defiant bravado of POISON RUIN’s established fantasy aesthetics. While the record continues POISON RUIN’S tradition of employing medieval-inflected fantasy imagery, Kennedy does not intend for these figures to be read as historically accurate. “I’m not very interested in conveying the historical facts of medieval culture. If we are to make sense of the present, we need to employ a more mythic mode of language and symbol to reach beyond the spiritual malaise that envelopes us. A mythic truth resonates within any time, but it’s echos call from outside of time. Medieval and fantasy imagery are simply effective personal starting points for tapping into that mode of communication.”
With Hymns From The Hills, POISON RUIN have accomplished a feat of creative labor which few have the courage to entertain, much less the capacity to execute so effectively. Hymns From The Hills ambitiously rewrites the very rules of what punk is capable of achieving, pushing POISON RUIN’s sound into expansive new terrains without sacrificing an ounce of the bleak symbolism and uncompromising aggression that first established them as an urgent new voice in the world of extreme music.
The Marked Men is an American punk rock band from Denton, Texas, composed of guitarists/vocalists Jeff Burke and Mark Ryan, bassist Joe Ayoub, and drummer Mike Throneberry.
They have released four albums through Rip Off Records, Dirtnap Records, and Swami Records. Their most recent album, Ghosts, was released in 2009 through Dirtnap.
Emerging like a missile from some surreptitious silo in southwestern Ohio, The Serfs are a deliberately nebulous and incidentally industrialist gang of dance-floor hymners– perturbed and tranced-out troubadours whose sound and musical ideology seems to be a causal manifestation of their immediate environments–hard-wired and hypnotic synthesized melodies propel alongside churning and scraping percussion of every metallic tonality–with temperamental and eremitic words and voices dictating the forlorn venture. Like their Ohio predecessors, The Serfs seem askew from the art that surrounds them, and proud of it.
Finally, the long-awaited debut album from Philadelphia’s Zorn. While Zorn’s theatrical, (literally) scorching live shows are the stuff of legend, it would be a grave mistake to think the chaos they summon is all about the flaming swords, makeup, and leather corsets. Like Alice Cooper and David Bowie before them, Zorn knows you gotta have the songs to back up the image. Zorn’s metal-punk draws on death rock melody, intricate thrash riffing, and the bulldozing power of Discharge-inspired hardcore bands, but the songs are as infectious as they are intense. As with early Metallica, tracks like “Already Dead” and “Delco Devil Mosh” are built on memorable melodies that, in another time and place, might have formed the backbone of a killer glam rock single. I’m happy with my current reality, though, where Zorn is the kind of band who puts a devil standing atop a pile of flaming skulls on the cover of their album.