Fell Ruin – Cast in Oil the Dressed Wrought (Review)

This is the second album from Fell Ruin, a blackened doom band from the US.

It has been a while since we last heard from Fell Ruin, but I liked 2015’s Devices and 2017’s To the Concrete Drifts enough that when I discovered a new album was coming out, I knew I wanted to absorb its dark charms.

Spreading out across 34 minutes like a virulent plague, Cast in Oil the Dressed Wrought offers a harsh and disturbing vision of modern black metal. In fact, it is more than just black metal; mixing together black metal, doom, and sludge into a toxic cocktail that has enough kick to dissolve your insides, Fell Ruin’s hybrid music is lethal.

Consisting of two intros/interludes and four songs proper, this is a relatively brief album that packs in a lot of content to make up for it; Fell Ruin are about quality over quantity. The songs rule over a wide extreme metal territory, taking aspects of black, doom, and sludge metal and smashing them together in a range of inventive and horrifying ways. The band have a multitude of weapons to cause damage, and these songs deal out punishment like it’s going out of business.

Harsh and unforgiving Cast in Oil the Dressed Wrought may be, but it’s certainly not one-dimensional. The songs have an avant-garde, atypical feel to them that’s unsettling and strange; Fell Ruin use this to their advantage, enhancing the songs with atmospheres that are not those of your standard blackened act. Yes, this is a surprisingly textured and multicoloured monster, and spans a breadth of different feelings and moods. All of them are hopeless and grim of course, but within this Fell Ruin spread their wings wide. After all, the apocalypse can take many forms, can it not?

Warped and nightmarish, Cast in Oil the Dressed Wrought has been worth the wait. Do you fancy being scarred and brutalised by malignant blackened doom? Of course you do, so don’t miss out on Fell Ruin’s latest.