Friend of mine has been harping on about these sorts for a while, urging me to check them out. Now, I’m instantly wary of big-label metalcore (even if these guys did have a record out on Southern Lord…), but upon seeing a copy of this for a quid I figured I had very little to lose other than another small shred of dignity.
Result? Big, slick, bombastic melodic metal that milks the Gothenburg teat for inspiration and, mercifully, steers clear of many of the genre’s more objectionable trappings (lousy beatdowns, moronic sung parts etc.) so the “core” element is effectively snipped from that dread pigeonhole and the metal left intact.
What remains is a jagged assortment of precision riffing, impossible solos, snarled vocals and frothy, melodramatic lyrics concerning the healing of wounds, thus constituting Undoing Ruin‘s eleven similar-sounding songs and not sounding too bad as it goes about its overblown business. True, it’s hardly Slaughter of the Soul, and metal is generally preferable when rougher, heavier and charged with a real fire in its belly, but hey – this has lasted forty minutes without being thrown from the window and only cost me the price of a bag of chips, which, when my tolerance threshold is at an all time low, has to count for something.