Review Summary:
For whom the bell tolls, time marches on
Legacy Of Ruin is Eight Bells’ third album. The project is the brainchild of Portland, Oregon musician Melynda Jackson, who is the only remaining member from the lineup that produced the group’s last album, 2016’s
Landless. With this release, two new members have joined Jackson, both veterans of several bands (Cormorant being the most prominent of the bunch). The results of the new lineup’s work together are quite impressive, producing an engrossingly dark canvas which eschews easy genre classification.
If Eight Bells have a formula on
Legacy Of Ruin, it’s the combination of punishing doomy riffs and eerie harmonic vocals, but to leave it at that downplays the amount of variety which compiles over the course of the album’s six tracks.There are moments in which the record seems to lean towards straight-ahead stoner doom, others where things veer towards post-rock, and yet more where an ever-present 70’s hard rock vibe seems to be gaining ascendancy. Every song, most of them lengthy, develops its own character, often with multiple sections melded together with well-executed transitions.
Legacy Of Ruin isn’t relentlessly heavy in the way that doom or post-metal bands often attempt to be. That isn’t to say that this album won’t satisfy Sputnik’s resident metalheads, though (at least a certain breed of them). The tunes here will reliably get the head nodding with their sense of groove, and the riff supply is certainly adequate. More broadly, the capably produced atmosphere is bleak and rather unsettling, with moments such as the grim chant which closes out the second song, repeated over and over: “our well runs dry, Lord hear our cry”. Additionally, in the album’s latter stages the heaviness factor gets ratcheted up. There’s some fierce riffage in the penultimate track “The Crone”, which also sees some black metal-esque shrieks, while closer “Premonition” accrues a pagan feeling as it plods relentlessly through its dismal nine minute runtime.
Few aspects of
Legacy Of Ruin are flashy, but it’s a well-crafted work all around. While I’d hesitate to call the sound here truly innovative, it certainly avoids the “generic” label which all too often flies around groups adjacent to the doom/stoner scene. This is one of those albums best-likened to that old cliche: a journey. The music doesn’t repeat, but rather evolves throughout, building upon itself. Eight Bells are the type of group to understand that sometimes the quiet and the ominous can be just as oppressive as the blaring and the monstrous, and the careful balance of such competing elements is what makes this album tick.
