Poison Ruin - Hymns From the Hills [CD]

POISON RUIN return with their highly anticipated sophomore LP, Hymns From the Hills. Building off the strengths of their existing oeuvre, the band has developed their signature approach to grim mythmaking and scythe-swinging aggression in bold new directions, offering up a new body of songs that strike one as equal parts natural, undeniably of this world, and phantasmal.

The band's vision has grown substantially, pushing well past the tales of peasants and serfs that stood as allegories for contemporary alienation in their previous work: on this newest offering, Their previous stories of toil and dispossession are revealed to be but one chapter etched upon a bleaker tapestry, one populated by spirits traversing sunless deserts and wilted hillsides, demonic torture objects limning the edges of the psyche, bodies transfigured into Luciferian snakes, Sadean prisoners bound to the screaming silence of abandoned castle towers. The record is at once a forceful restatement of POISON RUIN's trademark sound and a departure from it, the crackling, cassette-dubbed darkness and crushing rhythms listeners have become accustomed to buttressed by a carefully sculpted mosaic of new textures, from flourishes of Killing Joke hacksaw primitivism and blast-beats worthy of the Relapse catalogue number to crisp analog synth lines and ambient serenades reminiscent of Scott Walker and The Durutti Column. Like a serpent moving ever outward with spiraling circularity, Hymns From the Hills expands POISON RUIN's sonic landscape in imaginative new directions while maintaining its center of gravity firmly in the band’s already established mythos.

Hymns From the Hills is meticulously composed. Much like the rest of POISON RUIN's body of work, this LP was self-recorded without the use of professional studio equipment. To meet the greater sonic demands of Hymns From the Hills, however, mastermind Mac Kennedy relocated to a private practice space, retiring from his previous routine of squeezing in tracking sessions around the rare moments that the band’s shared practice space happened to be vacant. “Having added time to breathe and really get things right felt crucial this time,” he remarks. “The stress of having to work quickly and at chaotic intervals used to feel productive in a lot of ways, in that it instilled a sort of rough, energetic ethos into the recordings, but I also started to realize that those working habits were becoming an easy way to let myself off the hook from pursuing certain ideas that required a more measured, methodical approach.” To best serve the record’s grander ambitions, the band enlisted the mixing prowess of Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Career Suicide) and the mastering of Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Trapped Under Ice, Cavalera, Integrity), who helped to elevate the record’s teeming variety of sounds to new heights of self-assured fidelity. Kennedy lent a second hand to the mixing process, splicing in grittier tape recorded segments in order to maintain a certain tonal continuity with the band’s previous work, creating a rich structure of unconventional frictions, crystalline flashes of polish ripping through abysses of hissing low end only to shatter against the whipping sting of rusted chains moments later.

Lyrically, Hymns From The Hills extends both the cynicism and the defiant bravado of POISON RUIN's established fantasy aesthetics. While the record continues POISON RUIN'S tradition of employing medieval-inflected fantasy imagery, Kennedy does not intend for these figures to be read as historically accurate: “I’m not interested in the actual facts of medieval culture, and I’m not trying to draw a sort of literal comparison between peasant life and the political realities of today. Rather, I think in order to really make sense of the present you have to get outside of history altogether, in a certain way—you have to find some sort of mythic language for talking about the spiritual damage that surrounds us, a mythology that can somehow escape the limits on imagination that are imposed upon us. For me, medieval imagery and fantasy aesthetics have always felt like a powerful starting point for creating that sort of mythology. If one is forced to be in Babylon, how can you find a way to live both through it and beyond it?”

With Hymns From The Hills, POISON RUIN have accomplished a feat of creative labor which few have the courage to entertain, much less the capacity to execute so effectively. They have upped the ante: they have set out to make "The Record". Hymns From The Hills ambitiously rewrites the very rules of what punk is capable of achieving, pushing POISON RUIN's sound into expansive new terrains without sacrificing an ounce of the bleak symbolism and uncompromising aggression that first established them as an urgent new voice in the world of extreme music.