Review Summary: Well it's sort of like Reptar if he wasn't a fictional green dinosaur from a kid's show...
On any given night, Christian Lembach suffers anywhere between two and seven brain aneurysms; there's about a 35% chance that Travis Owen's drumsticks formerly played the roles of his tibiae; Jake Shultz's bass amp has caused clinical deafness in at least two dozen people. While none of the preceding statements are based whatsoever in fact, a listen or two through
Ruiner just might get you wondering. The five-track debut EP from Atlanta's Whores. displays the trio's uncanny ability to put their angst, anguish, and general discontent into an audial form best described as a septum-bashing, and to do so without any gimmicks, frills, or blood-stained death-masks.
To put it one way, Lembach's unbridled songwriting very accurately reflects the fact that living amongst some of today's less than grateful, self-centered scumbags is often akin to brushing one's teeth with sandpaper.
Ruiner is the barbed-wire floss to counteract that; it is the means by which these three southern noise-rockers bite back against the world's shitty ways and its shittier inhabitants. Opener 'Daddy's Money' recapitulates the story of that certain vapid, over-privileged bitch that everyone seems to know, whose father's rent checks just happen to go right up her button nose instead. Or take a track like 'Tell Me Something Scientific,' whose production and execution are as raw as its anti-religious-fundantalist message is obvious. Even the fact that the track's central riff and melody resembles those of the intro to 'Fake Life' just a little too closely is so easily forgivable considering the group's incredible propensity to grind their message home - in a nice way, if that's at all conceivable. Despite its noise-rock roots, nothing about
Ruiner comes off as inaccessible: its unrelenting noisiness carries as much purpose and direction as its songwriting, meanwhile maintaining enough of their "fuck-off" attitude to lend the album its cutthroat allure. It vividly recalls and rehashes all of punk-rock's most essential mantras and motifs whilst supplementing them with some seriously pulverizing neo-monolithic riffage, cementing
Ruiner as an end-of-the-year record worth delving back into a now retired 2011 for.
