Idle Ruin — Idle Ruin review
Idle Ruin is an Australian Thrash/Death Metal band from Australia founded in 2020, and this review will be about this bands self-titled debut EP, “Idle Ruin”.
The album cover is pretty simple and to me looks really old school. The cover depicts a zombie looking dude reaching with his right hand towards you, while sitting in what appears to be water or some other form of liquid. The artwork does remind me a lot of the style of Blackened Thrash. Many of those albums have this kind of simple, black and white look. Stuff like Toxic Holocaust’s “Conjure and Command”, Aura Noir’s “Black Thrash Attack” and Blasphemy albums like “Fallen Angel of Doom, well you get the idea. Personally I really like this type of album covers. The kind that, is pretty simple but at the same time meaningful.
The EP doesn’t give you a particularly long warm up and hits you pretty fast with blast beats and some heavy and crushing guitar sounds. Just the title itself describes it pretty well how brutal the sound is, “Whipped to Death”. If I would compare their sounds to other bands, I can hear a lot of Slayer, Marduk and Sodom. For being described as a Thrash/Death Metal band I think Idle Ruin has a lot Black Metal in their sound. And as I discussed before, the imagery also feels a lot like Blackened Thrash.
I also do really like something that they did in the last song, which is the long solo and the last half of the song being more or less instrumental. This leads to the album ending in a little bit of a different way which really improves the EP as a whole to me. I really like when bands change and add certain things to the end making it interesting all the way through. It does also feel like a very natural way for an album or EP to end. Some bands just does their thing and all of a sudden it just becomes quite and you soon realize that, oh wait that was the end? But I believe that Idle Ruin did this very good on this EP.
I am however going to give Idle Ruin the same critique as I usually give bands though, and that is that the songs have a very similar sound making them kind of melt together. The songs loses their originality and doesn’t stick out from each other very much. This doesn’t necessarily need to be a bad thing though, depending on what the bands vision and purpose with the EP is or what you as a listener is looking for. One thing that I do believe could improve the EP is if the songs choruses where more prominent. However, it is worth to mention that all genres and types of music doesn’t have as prominent choruses and this could be explained by genre and style. Or once again, it depends on what the band wants to say and what message they want to send with the album. I did nonetheless feel that it was relevant to bring up.
Overall, I believe that its perhaps not the most original EP I’ve heard but it is very good, I could definitely see myself replaying this EP soon. If you are into extreme metal like the bands I previously mentioned (Slayer, Sodom, Kreator etc.) you should definitely give this EP a listen because I am sure you will like it. It’s going to be very interesting to hear what this band is going to release in the future.
7/10
For a detailed description of the verdicts click here
