ninehertz

Road to Masochist, the South West label and promoters, have been performing wonders for the UK underground for some time now, and this year seems to have only increased their output. We've already had the excellent Acceptance album from them, now this, with Ba'al to follow soon. And speaking of stepping up, Row of Ashes are a band talked of in the scene fondly in recent times, with good reason, but even so, I wasn't expecting Tide Into Ruin to be this good.

I had the opening track on a couple of times, sat down to review but then aborted for outside factors, but only when I actually managed to find undistracted time, third time round did it fully click. The aggressive and fast infancy of the song is all good, but what took me a little time to appreciate is how in the chaos, in the racket of sound there is clever and delicate interplay going on, an architecture to admire well inside the wall of noise. This gives way to the even crunchier Fracture which almost traverses into the complex and whirling worlds of Amenra.

You have to admire the maelstrom of noise they create on almost every track which generates the sensation of being trapped in on all sides. And what's even more impressive is how the album actually gets stronger - the songs later than the mid-point interlude raise the bar further. Immoralist has this sit-up-and-listen opening with engrossing guitar noises and granite heavy riffs, whilst the following Wretch has a Converge-meets-Isis matrix overloaded with a sheer hefty weight.

All in all, extremely impressive - hardcore and post-metal welded together to harness and extract the exciting elements of each in a manner which feels pretty new. Add in the fact there's some genuinely superb tracks in here, on an album that consistently bubbles away with a vibrancy and real sense of urgency, a fire beneath this that makes this an unmissable album.