ALBUM REVIEW: The Pornography Of Ruin – Hush
Ah, summer; beaches, barbecues, and crust-infused, sludge-caked meditations on personal destruction and transformation. Ok, so perhaps the new album from New York-based post-metallers HUSH isn’t going to make it onto your sunbathing playlist, but if you’ve come looking for a hefty, gloomy antidote then you’re absolutely in the right place. The Pornography Of Ruin is a bleak and difficult record – as indeed post-metal usually is. It moves slowly and steadily, unafraid to use a myriad of methods to crush its listeners under its ever-imposing weight.
Coming a good four years after their previous release Untitled II, HUSH’s third full-length draws heavily from vocalist and lyricist Charles Cure’s experiences following a car accident that left him unable to walk for several months in 2016. As such, it’s no great surprise that pain and fury often feel front and centre across these 56 minutes. For the most part, Cure opts for an utterly scorching bellow – the kind you might expect from either of NEUROSIS’ frontmen, for example. The band match him ably throughout, happily blurring the already hazy lines between doom, sludge and post-metal. Granted, it might ring a few bells, but only the kind a band like HUSH should want to ring anyway.
As alluded to at the top, The Pornography Of Ruin is a heavy record in more ways than one. Moving beyond the more traditional metrics of downtuned riffing, thunderous drums and harsh vocals, it’s hard to shake the thick sense of melancholy that envelopes all seven tracks here. Even at its quietest, it remains highly atmospheric – a sort of daunting menace, or even a gloomy grandeur perhaps. It’s also not as though these moments are secondary either; opener I Am Without Heaven And A Law Unto Myself (honestly, watch out for these track titles) for example spends most of its eight-minute runtime on sparse pianos, clean guitars and more ponderous post-punkisms. It provides a dark and powerful start to the record, setting a bar that HUSH meet pretty steadily throughout.
Moving into the meat of the record, there are a few stand outs here. Third track There Can Be No Forgiveness Without The Shedding Of Blood is arguably the most instantly arresting; it’s the shortest too, but even this still stretches respectably past the four-minute mark with its suffocating riffs and apoplectic vocals. Next, By This You Are Truly Known almost trebles the length of its predecessor, providing the album’s stunning centre-piece in the process. It takes its time to build as per, eventually thundering into life before taking another quieter turn around the halfway mark for a lengthy, dream-like break that feels quite unexpectedly beautiful given its surroundings. There’s more of this on sixth track The Sound Of Kindness In The Voice too, this one devoting all eight-and-a-half of its minutes to spoken vocals and glacial synths and strings.
As for gripes, the main one is predictable, and potentially a little harsh, but The Pornography Of Ruin really is quite long. Yes, we know that’s kind of the point in post-metal, and at 56 minutes it’s hardly the worst offender, but even with the relative change of pace afforded by The Sound Of Kindness… it does feel like the record starts to meander a little towards the end.
Then again, most fans of the genre are unlikely to have too many troubles with the length of The Pornography Of Ruin. This is an accomplished and dynamic work, one that even finds moments of quite surprising beauty in the midst of its consistent weight and heft. HUSH may lean on a few tricks of the trade we’ve heard a good few times before – namely the whole quiet-loud-quiet-loud dynamic – but they clearly know how to use them well, and in doing so have produced an album that invites and indeed rewards a fair degree of investment from its listeners.
Rating: 7/10
The Pornography Of Ruin is set for release on June 24th via Sludgelord Records.
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