Poison Ruïn – Hymns From the Hills
The hills are necessary, but the horizon should always point toward higher mountains.
Even before its announcement, the second proper full-length album by Poison Ruïn already seemed destined to become a landmark release for contemporary underground punk. As shown on their highly anticipated debut H
Having made the expected crossover impact three years ago, Poison Ruïn return with the most demanding album of their career. In a sense, Hymns From the Hills finds the band more experienced than ever before: tight, battle-hardened by touring and exposure, and fully aware of their own endurance. The record functions as a vast filter through which the band push their musical language to its limits. Listening to the title track, it immediately becomes clear that Poison Ruïn have refined their chord progressions and decided, across the album’s roughly 43-minute duration, to cram in as much information as possible.
Naturally, the raspy vocals, dungeon synth influences, and traces of medieval epic and black metal aesthetics are all present. As far as the production is concerned, however, forget the mythic quality of their first two cassette releases. If you want to revisit that dungeon-dwelling post-punk that takes The Wipers and hurls them into a bat-infested cave, you might be better off listening to Altar of Eden. Here, without cleaning up their sound to a criminal extent, Poison Ruïn have dusted it off just enough to balance themselves even more clearly between the poles of Manilla Road and New Model Army. Only under such conditions could a song like “Pilgrimage” find an organic place within their discography.
Secondly, Poison Ruïn smooth out their monolithic anarcho-punk momentum, sounding more “musical” than ever before. This progression becomes evident in songs such as the outstanding “Lilly of the Valley,” but also in the radically divergent “Serpent’s Curse,” which, however, never truly reaches a climax. Additionally, the entirely Swedish-sounding ’80s metal excursion of “Crescent Sun,” fascinating as it may be, along with the Scandinavian-inflected goth-black metal guitar carnage of the closing “The Standoff,” reveals a palpable sense of temporary disorientation to those willing to embrace the intrigue and delve deeper.
Taking into account, furthermore, that while the heart of Poison Ruïn remains socially aligned in all the right ways, their lyrics have adopted a slightly, but significantly, more generalized character, it becomes clear that the band are pursuing expansion. A group that has successfully developed its own artistic identity is under no obligation to become imprisoned within it, especially not by the expectations of its most devoted audience. Viewed through this lens, and purely in artistic terms, Hymns From the Hills is one of the landmark punk albums of the year. It is also, in my opinion, a courageous leap of faith into the void by a band whose stubbornness made them such a vital force to begin with.
That stubbornness, while still detectable in moments such as “Turn to Dust,” remains more of a constituent element within a cocktail still undergoing exploration. Slightly disoriented, largely under the weight of its own brilliance, and entangled in a somewhat toxic dosage of convergent yet heterogeneous ingredients, the album ultimately feels as though it addresses listeners who approach underground punk as an almost exotic territory, a place where they occasionally dig deep enough to uncover diamonds.
Depending, then, on whom one believes this record is addressing, and on the particular balance one chooses to privilege, I suspect that Hymns From the Hills contains enough elements to keep listeners sheltered within its communal caves. Yet one can only hope that, in the future, what currently appears on the horizon will reveal itself to be an untrodden, proud mountain, rather than merely a hill offering temporary refuge from capitalist suffocation.
A Greek version of the review was published in Rocking.gr.
