Ha! 2025 didn’t yield its usual crop of brutal Death Metal pieces yet and we’re behind on quota. Management is fuming and will be cutting benefits if the review desk won’t get a move on.
So, luckily, our scouts found an obscure Extreme Metal band from the Bay Area that stubbornly stuck to the smelly underbelly of the alloy-laced underground. Meaning, despite endlessly riffing about stages and soundscapes, they didn’t quite get to that breakthrough yet. The famed metal nirvana many a band attempted to reach but few ever did.
So, let’s explore. Ominous Ruin state that they did something different this time. And it ended in a Requiem, of all things. Good news or bad? We’ve seen worse, methinks.
They are in The Zone. The Death Metal Zone and they flood it well. More specifically, this band is hyperactive, where tech death feels most comfortable. Put differently, you’ll get a mix somewhere in between Stortregn and the masters over at Archspire with some Nile-ish reckoning baked into the production. And this name-calling madness here will tell you where the band is taking this. Ominous Ruin try to improve on other tech death masters by taking the mad riffing fest here to the next level. Stocked with superior quality axemen, Requiem indeed delivers a relentless assault of razor-sharp Extreme Metal at almost impeccable levels. This goes hand in hand with a knack to inject enough melodic elements to break things up some. Or at least, they try. But more to that later.
So, why does the band seem dissatisfied with their performance so far? After all, they’ve been riffing about the local stages since 2010 with only the debut to show for. And that’s exactly the point. Aimlessly pounding the dust at local festivals won’t really clinch it for a band hungering for the world stage. So, drumroll, in comes the unknown new vocalist Crystal Rose with her considerable potential for vile growls and rasps on par with masters such as Sonja Rosenlund (Panzerchrist) or the overhyped Alissa White-Gluz (Arch Enemy). She comes equipped with a pair of mean pipes that will rasp your conscious thinking into finely chiseled brainchips. A merciless assault on your eardrums with nary a clear note in between. And that’s a clear uptick over their 2021 performance on Amidst Voices that Echo in Stone.
And yet. Something doesn’t quite sync on Requiem. You see, all ingredients to greatness are freely available on this record. On one hand the band delivers top-notch technical performance on a stellar Death Metal platform. On the other hand, the mighty aggression of the new vocalist should really take this to the next level. Add to that the attempts to include melodic elements into the fray to break things up, and the band should be able to deliver an equally great avalanche of red-hot alloy.
Instead, the RMR crew found compartmentalization. The iron fist of tech death works pretty well with the vocals. But no (smooth) integration of melodics into the overall Death Metal brutality manifests itself. It’s all in different little boxes. Useless intros, outros, and interludes galore filled with ambients and acoustics make their appearance. But instead of generating the feeling of a refined amalgamation, the record comes across as disjointed and stops making sense after a while. Furthermore, the tech death parts appear to be bricked to the point that everything happens at once on this soundscape. And that turns Requiem into a tedious listen after a while.
Ultimately, nomen est omen. Requiem turned into a lament of what could have been, if only somebody had opened the faucets of superior songwriting and better arrangement. In a sense, this band exudes the same vibes as early Metallica.1 If you remember, before they reformed to greatness, the only thing they wanted is to play loud, fast, scream at the audience, and yell ‘Yeah’ as many times as they could. Ominous Ruin here are at some similar level. In other words, I can hear the talent and feel the desire to take this further. But to get there, there must be more than just stringing elements together and zapping them on a disk.
And that doesn’t mean that Requiem is a bad record, far from it. But there’s a lot to improve and at the stage they’re at, this here record barely made it over the ‘good’ threshold.
Until we meet again.
Record Rating: 6/10 | Label: Willowtip Records | Web: Official Band Site
Release Date: 9 May 2025
- And yes, we know, they’re not tech death. So, spare us. -Ed.-↩