When metal bands pick up a video game, it's usually for a laugh. The ones I've come across played it as a joke, and there is a whole subgenre, nintendocore, that takes the sound of game soundtracks and leaves the stories behind. OLD RUINS from Gelsenkirchen go the other way. Both of their albums are built on Blizzard's Diablo, and they treat it with a straight face. Mount Arreat is the second of them, out on September 18 on Sick Taste Records, three years after Always Heading East.
The band say you don't need to know the game to follow along. "When you close your eyes and put the record on, you really dive into the mystical story of the dark wanderer," they explain. "If you're not versed in the history of the video game, you can still immerse yourself in the dark musical world." The game is right there on the cover, too. Timon Kokott's painting puts the mountain from the album title in the center, with units gathering at its foot.
Musically this is a mix of melodic and atmospheric black metal, melodic death metal and classic heavy metal, and the sound is old-school rather than polished. The guitars are definitely the strongest part of the record, and the guitarist is very talented. For me the standout is "Gates Of Harrogath". It rides a catchy melodic black metal riff, then drops into clean guitar passages of the kind you'd expect on a classic heavy metal album. Those clean parts turn up in other songs as well. "Call To Arms" goes further. It sounds like old-school heavy metal with screamed vocals over the top, and it has a proper classic heavy metal solo.
The black metal side gets its moments. "Uileloscadh Mor" opens with rain and keys before it turns into atmospheric black metal that would leave SUMMONING fans happy. "Nihlathak" is the fast one: blast beats and a lot of energy, and you can picture armies charging their enemies across a battlefield. The ending is strong. "Tyrael's Despair" brings in clean vocals delivered as desperate shouts, which fits the band's description of the song as a tribute to a game ending where "you've won, yet at the same time you feel as though you've lost." Not everything lands. "Lord Of Destruction" has some heavy metal solos and passages, but its riffing doesn't stand out.
My main reservations are about how it all sits together. The drums stand out instead of being an organic part of the sound. That partly works with the old-school, non-overproduced feel of the record, but I'd have preferred them a little quieter, and the final mix and mastering could be better. The guitars have a related problem. They sometimes sound more classic heavy metal than the rest of the music, and for me that doesn't always play well with the black metal around it. The guitarist doesn't need to put a classic heavy metal solo everywhere.
Mount Arreat is a good album. I like the idea behind it, I like the atmospheric black metal passages, and the band clearly have a lot of good ideas. Right now those ideas come across as a collection more than as one cohesive record. If OLD RUINS can pull them together, with the drums brought back into the mix and the solos kept for where they count, the next climb could go a lot higher.
★★★½ 7/10
OLD RUINS - Tyrael's Despair (official video):
Follow OLD RUINS
- Bandcamp: https://oldruins.bandcamp.com
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/OldRuinsGE
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/oldruins.official/
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@oldruins4419
- Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/artist/16B7r7ccFBc2CGIdwzxSWA
- Apple Music: https://music.apple.com/us/artist/old-ruins/1538466541
Promo provided by Metal Message.