Pick up your metal mixing bowl. Combine 3 parts deathcore, 2 parts djent and 1 part 8 bit video game music. Bake it in hell fire for 47 minutes and 2 seconds and you have Black Heart, the sixth studio album from Massachusetts’ Within The Ruins.
I often find at times when listening to Within The Ruins I think the playlist has ended and “Gee when did Powerglove get so Djenty?” only to realise it’s still the same album. It’s not often you find jaunty Super Mario music in a deathcore song, but it works very effectively for these fellows.
Whether it is trying hard to stray away from being categorised with one of the dirty words in metal – deathcore, metalcore, insert genre here-core, or just simply following the crowd, so many bands now all sound the same. Favouring implementing too many progressive and complex rhythms to avoid being stuck with one of the aforementioned labels. Not necessarily bad, just indistinguishable. It’s often hard to find a band that stands out as memorable amongst the pack. However Within The Ruins certainly do.
This is abundantly technical album. More tapping than Michael Flatley in his prime. No doubt extremely impressive, however it’s very balls out full throttle almost all the time. On a more straight forward pumping groove album, like the recent album from hardcore heroes Hatebreed, you can get away with it. Especially when the album just teeters on the half hour mark. I feel like Black Heart would benefit from a few more moments of slowing down. Allowing you to digest the wizardry before getting your face melted by the next bout of riffing.
Eighty Sixed finally slows things down a little. Letting the soup simmer on a melodic intro passage, through the first of two instrumentals on the album. You can clearly hear Tetris and Inspector Gadget making their way onto the song. It bounces backwards and forwards between passages throughout, which may not be everyone’s cup of tea, but I certainly appreciate it. There are less of these jaunty passes on this album than some of their previous work. Still just as enjoyable when they pop up though.
This is the first album with new vocalist Steve Tinnon. It’s easy to overlook his dirty vocal work with all the technical witchcraft flowing around him, but he certainly put’s in a great performance. I am not particularly cooking for the clean vocal parts. Not bad, just a little superfluous. Just leave the excellent growling.
Overall I don’t think Black Heart is the best album from Within The Ruins, but it certainly is a very good, accomplished piece of work and well worth a listen. Plenty of bands could learn a thing or two from these maestros.
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