Review Summary: Half of it, and a bit more, is right up there.
With more than 20 years under their belts, and featuring members involved in numerous projects of the Greek underground scene,
Burial Hordes have established their name without actively seeking the spotlight. With their first 2 full length albums in 2005 and 2008, the band started off as a pretty straightforward, traditional black metal outlet influenced by legends of the genre like early
Bathory and
Mayhem, along with a healthy respect for 80’s thrash and speed metal and as blasphemous as possible. Entering the second decade of our millennium, from
Incendium in 2014 and onwards, they moved on to a more modern approach of blackened death, with cleaner sound and clearer melodies, in what would be a mixture of
Mgła /
Behemoth and Swedish bands such as
Necrophobic.
Ruins is the next installment in this renewed direction and is intended for fans that like music of their own time period without fantasizing about the golden old days. The whole of the album maintains a quite ominous atmosphere, emerging from the afflicting guitar lines and deep growls of the singer, who gives the most distinct death metal element in what would otherwise be a fairly fierce and bold black metal work. When
Burial Hordes speed up,
Ruins achieves some solid intensity and can make the floor shake, as it is obvious from tracks like “Isentropic Eradication” or “Perish”. The record’s drum work is sensational, handled by Eugene Ryabchenko, who currently also plays in
Fleshgod Apocalypse, and if that doesn’t ring a bell, it should.
With its polished production and a grim but glamorous artwork such as this, it seems that
Ruins has all it needs to achieve greatness. However,
Burial Hordes haven’t managed to get rid of a bug they have had trouble with almost for the last 10 years, and that’s the fact that their material often kind of leans on the side of banality rather than engagement for the listener. The structural weakness of the album is more obviously exposed during its slower parts, which simply had me waiting for the next heavy riff to come along. Then, slower and faster parts follow one another in each song, which creates a roller coaster of digging and not digging the album at its every minute.
The band is at its finest when it gets more furious, like through the massive riffs of “Purgation” and “Insubstantial”, where the playing style reminds a lot of
Bölzer, but I would say, less extravagant. There’s a good chunk of this record that is enjoyable and as a whole, there’s not much to complain about if you have a quick glance.
Burial Hordes hints how they can compose dynamic music, and they have the potential for a truly impactful release if they introduce maybe stricter filters to the material they compose, in order to avoid filler moments that unfortunately,
Ruins suffers a bit from. Nevertheless, the album still escapes stagnation by the skin of its teeth, which seems to be the case with the band for a while now.
