Poison Ruin – Hymns From the Hills (Swamp Green Vinyl)

Hymns From the Hills is meticulously composed. Much like the rest of POISON RUIN’s body of work, this LP was self-recorded without the use of professional studio equipment. To meet the greater sonic demands of Hymns From the Hills, however, mastermind Mac Kennedy relocated to a private practice space, retiring from his previous routine of squeezing in tracking sessions around the rare moments that the band’s shared practice space happened to be vacant. “Having added time to breathe and really get things right felt crucial this time,” he remarks. “The stress of having to work quickly and at chaotic intervals used to feel productive in a lot of ways, in that it instilled a sort of rough, energetic ethos into the recordings, but I also started to realize that those working habits were becoming an easy way to let myself off the hook from pursuing certain ideas that required a more measured, methodical approach.” To best serve the record’s grander ambitions, the band enlisted the mixing prowess of Jonah Falco (Fucked Up, Career Suicide) and the mastering of Arthur Rizk (Power Trip, Trapped Under Ice, Cavalera, Integrity), who helped to elevate the record’s teeming variety of sounds to new heights of self-assured fidelity. Kennedy lent a second hand to the mixing process, splicing in grittier tape recorded segments in order to maintain a certain tonal continuity with the band’s previous work, creating a rich structure of unconventional frictions, crystalline flashes of polish ripping through abysses of hissing low end only to shatter against the whipping sting of rusted chains moments later. Lyrically, Hymns From The Hills extends both the cynicism and the defiant bravado of POISON RUIN’s established fantasy aesthetics. While the record continues POISON RUIN’S tradition of employing medieval-inflected fantasy imagery, Kennedy does not intend for these figures to be read as historically accurate: “I’m not interested in the actual facts of medieval culture, and I’m not trying to draw a sort of literal comparison between peasant life and the political realities of today. Rather, I think in order to really make sense of the present you have to get outside of history altogether, in a certain way-you have to find some sort of mythic language for talking about the spiritual damage that surrounds us, a mythology that can somehow escape the limits on imagination that are imposed upon us. For me, medieval imagery and fantasy aesthetics have always felt like a powerful starting point for creating that sort of mythology. If one is forced to be in Babylon, how can you find a way to live both through it and beyond it?” With Hymns From The Hills, POISON RUIN have accomplished a feat of creative labor which few have the courage to entertain, much less the capacity to execute so effectively. They have upped the ante: they have set out to make “The Record”. Hymns From The Hills ambitiously rewrites the very rules of what punk is capable of achieving, pushing POISON RUIN’s sound into expansive new terrains without sacrificing an ounce of the bleak symbolism and uncompromising aggression that first established them as an urgent new voice in the world of extreme music.