Undercroft — Ruins of Gomorrah
As lame as this sounds, the intro and outro were the highlights of this album (for me, anyway) . A nice acoustic guitar is built upon by drums and metal chords, and the first song takes it from there. The outro is the opposite; metal and hot, female moans into the acoustic guitar. The eight songs in between are fun, but nothing mind-blowing. Undercroft's influences are made quite apparent, and it helps to break up the album, stylistically. I'm sure it's not a surprise to anyone that a South American metal band would be influenced by Sepultura. Two tracks here feature some nice, Roots-era Sepultura worship (El Triunfo de la Muerte and Empalando Al Invasor). There are tribal drums, rad riffs, interesting horns, and really cool grooves. Roots isn't my favorite Sepultura album by any means, but I like the Undercroft stuff. Maybe I was let down when Max and the boys did Roots and I have no connection to Undercroft. Whatever. There are a handful of songs on here that, to me, show strong Morbid Angel influence. Unfortunately, it's Domination-era Morbid, but it still sounds pretty nice. Other than the previous mentions, one can also hear some classic Swedish guitar tones and the vocals sound like a mix between Meshuggah and Ripping Corpse/Dim Mak. It's not surprising, as Undercroft worked with Swedish producer Daniel Bergstrand (on Ruins and Evilusion in 2002). Season of Mist added a bonus track to the cd, Undercroft's cover of Twisted Sister's The Beast. It's a typical heavy metal cover complete with super heavy guitars and horribly misplaced vocals. The switch from heavy metal, to death metal, to almost nu-metal keeps the listener on his toes. This would normally annoy me, but it works well enough on this album.
The only real problem I found with Ruins is during the title track. This song starts off with nice acoustic guitars and cool bongos, but soon turns into metal parody. The hysterical choral chants and heavy metal instruments successfully ruin the really nice first half of the song. Pity, too, as the first half is really nice.
Undercroft's latest release is standard heavy metal kept semi interesting by playing over a few different sub-genres. Seasoned metal-heads won't find anything earth shattering here, but someone in junior high getting his feet wet might. This is a good gateway metal cd.