Thursday 5 March 2015

Ramlord - 'Ramlord' EP (Review)


Album Type: EP
Date Released: 10/3/2015
Label: Broken Limbs

‘Ramlord’ 7inch track listing:

1). 'The Breached Sanctum'
2). 'The Fog of Neglect'

Ramlord is:

Jann | void wailing riffhunter
Benn | knuckle grinding blastmage
Mikke  | seismic barbarian

Review:

'Self-titled releases always make me second guess a band's intentions. Is this a defining statement of the band's core sound? Is it some sort of manifesto? Did they just have no other good ideas for titles? I'm not familiar with Ramlord's previous output so, besides speculation, it's a pretty moot point. Adorned with the grimmest of astral/occult/morbid cover art, Ramlord spew forth their latest and self-titled two track EP.

Complete with the personality only competently unpolished production provides, Ramlord ease into the 'The Breached Sanctum' with clean arpeggiated guitar lines before launching into the blackened crusty riffstorms that sound way more fun than the cover art should allow. Keeping satisfyingly at perfect headbanging tempos for most of the song, riff follows riff as the dual harsh vocals play to each member's strength. Hell, this is a really well-written song.

'The Fog of Neglect' composes the second half of the EP, propelled by the drums that include toms and a kick that are so warm they can only be described as 'fluffy'. For a power trio the guitar is curiously subservient to the bass in the low to low-mid range, which makes a nice change from the wallflower bass tones and mixing so common to the genre. So the bass may not exactly compare in power to Joey DeMaio's sound (honestly though, I'm pretty sure only God could compete with that), but the bass on this EP is diiiirty. It sounds like I'd imagine a rotting manatee to look (just did a Google image search, I was right). Filthy.

At times the EP conjours up the thought of what Coffinworm would sound like if they injected more rock n' roll into their brilliantly miserable sound. It's great, and makes me wish I was around in the 80's tape trading days when my ignorance of that era makes me think I could expect to come across something that sounds as raw and powerful as this. '

Words by: Jake Mazlum

‘Ramlord’ is available here

For more information:


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Ramlord:
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