A new era for Ominous Ruin.
Four years after their debut album, Alex Bacey (guitar), Mitch Yoesle (bass), Adam Rosado (lyrics) and Petr Oplatka (guitar) recruited Joel Guernsey (guitar, ex-Inanimate Existence) and Crystal Rose (vocals) to give birth to Requiem, their second opus, released via Willowtip Records.
The album opens with a mysterious but gentle intro that eventually takes on melancholic tones thanks to the piano, before hitting full power on Seeds of Entropy, where saturation and howls are already clashing. Technicality is obviously part and parcel of this jerky, abrasive composition, which doesn’t hesitate to abuse piercing, dissonant harmonics to complement an aggressive rhythm before returning to the heavy Eternal, which takes malicious pleasure in molesting us in various ways. While some parts are more straightforward, there are still some sharp melodies and a soothing break to counterbalance the surge that leads into Bane of Syzygial Triality, a two-minute interlude of intriguing guitar sounds. Once we’ve caught our breath, the sound becomes ominous and then leads into Divergent Anomaly, where the sound becomes uncontrollable again and regularly explodes in our faces, revealing heaviness and rage, but also leads with ultra-fast, worked cosmic tones. Fractal Abhorrence keeps its modern fluid sounds, whether on samples or guitars, but the rest of the band continues to pour out all its fury as vaporous touches multiply and corrupt the violence, before a brief respite is granted with the dark introduction to Architect of Undoing. The vocalist returns after a long, chaotic instrumental section, playing with the assumed brutality of the riffs to finally reach a floating moment that flares up again, propelling us towards a new break made of metallic tones on which the moshpart comes to life. A few keystrokes later, the band resume their assault with Staring into the Abysm, featuring a succession of guitar and bass solos between two waves of violence, but the sound finally sinks into the abyss with a gentle lullaby that leads into Requiem, where saturation immediately revives to offer a new surge of heady harmonics that overload the sound already packed with effects of all kinds – including vocals – to close the album in the chaos with which it began.
Ominous Ruin‘s line-up may have changed, but the band’s determination to offer brutal, complex music has not! Requiem picks up where its predecessor left off and hits us with its own jerky riffs with the same rage.
85/100