Songs to end the world: Menace Ruine

Canada gets a pretty rough time of it, musically speaking.  One wit even went so far as to suggest that the USA needed to tighten up its border control to prevent the influx of Canadian bands and music.  Don't get me wrong: Canada has definitely earned something of a reputation for producing terrifyingly successful and overwhelmingly bland artists.  But I don't want to be negative here.  You see, there are a wealth of exceptionally talented musicians in Canada - challenging, intelligent artists producing works of very real merit, they just don't get the exposure that the dreck is awarded.  Well, in my own insignificant way I wish to take steps to redress that balance.  So, every once in a while I'll profile a Canadian band that I really dig.

And so it is to Menace Ruine.  They are a duo.  They hail from Montreal, Quebec.  The names they go by are Genevieve and S. de la Moth.  Their albums give no musical credits.  No instrument list.  No biographical detail.  As far as I am aware their photos have only appeared on the interior of their debut full-length: 'Cult of Ruins' and then their faces were shrouded in shadows, half-eaten by darkness.  They are startlingly prolific:  2008 and saw the release of not one but two full-length albums: 'The Die is Cast' being the latter.  They have then followed that by releasing an album every couple of years: 'Union of Irreconcilables' in 2010 and 'Alight in Ashes' in 2012.  They change labels fairly frequently, their most recent disc is released by the thoroughly awesome folks at Profound Lore records.

The band name.  The obfuscation.  The album titles.  You have to know that you're not in for an easy ride.

Together this duo sounds like the absolute end of the world.

Picture this: a vast ruined desert of blanched bone, worn by time and the elements down to the texture of dust.  Imagine a birdless sky, storm-choked and seething, the sun burnt down to a frozen cataract.  What few trees remain are scorched to their crooked spines and somewhere off in the distance the last vestiges of a city collapses into rot and ruin.  The air is thick with drifting ash and there is no life anywhere.  Every last vestige has been scythed away.
That is the world that this music conjures in my mind.  But next comes the tricky part: they make this entire vast emptiness - this howling abyss that is all that comes after - they make it seem glorious, seductive.  They make the monstrous beautiful.

Their debut disc - the wonderfully titled 'Cult of Ruins' - is black metal de-constructed down to the last shreds of itself and then reassembled by broken machines.  The hallmarks of the genre are there: the eerie tremolos, the insanely kinetic drumming, the rasping vocals.  But they've all been twisted and altered, shot through with avant-garde, experimental noise and industrial influences - the drums sound like a bone being rapped against the side of a battered pot, the vocals are suffocated in the mix and all the more terrifying for it, keyboards shriek and gibber like agitated baboons in an echo chamber.  And then there are the clean vocals...

But, a confession: I have never actually listened to that first disc in it's entirety - just fragments.  So I'll move along to the second disc and the one where things get really interesting.  For a start, the artwork on the rather modest digipak is a beautiful thing: rich dark hues and an almost holy-looking image - an angel bending over...what: a coin, a bowl, the fallen moon?  And a black-winged bird reflected in the surface below, inverted.  The back-cover depicts a many-eyed monster straight from a particularly feverish passage of Revelations.  All the interior text is printed in elaborate archaic font.  The whole things looks ancient and sacred.  And 'The Die is Cast' sounds like that too.

The overt black metal influences have been largely excised (though the disc still drips occult influences and that bleak and blasted vibe) and in their place are ominous drones, martial percussion and Genevieve's extraordinarily compelling voice.  The production is insane, cloaking everything in a layer of static and haze, making it impossible to discern what instruments are being played - sometimes you'll hear something that sounds like a church organ, other times it's clearly a muffled bass chord, occasionally something very like a hurdy-gurdy can be discerned but they all just briefly surface from the strange and blackened miasma, never really identifiable.  Listening to it, I'd half suspect that all the sounds were sampled from guitar and bass feedback - recorded and looped through a laptop setting, each one painstakingly reshaped, distorted, elongated, sculpted and layered into their final form.  The drumming is sublime: tribal, military, beating a rhythmic tattoo underneath the shifting chiaroscuro of the textural layers.

But imperative to all of this: Genevieve's voice is a rich, dark-hued contralto.  Her voice is unmodified, clean.  It is a crucial human element in this desolate mix.  She grounds the music.  Genevieve has the melancholy and icy detachment of German chanteuse Nico, but tempered with the more vulpine styling of Grace Slick.  The vocal melodies are always exquisite and often complex - even occasionally attaining a near-melodramatic, torch-song feel not entirely unlike Nancy Sinatra.  They seem to drift over the rhythmic drones, almost independently of them.  Genevieve doesn't so much sing as chant the lyrics.  These aren't songs, these are incantations: hymns to a degenerate God that long ago abandoned His dying Creation.

Follow-up 'The Union of Irreconcilables' expands their palette even further, reintroducing the black metal and noise influences and producing something far less accessible than 'The Die is Cast' (accessible being a very relative term in this context).  Again, the artwork prepares you for the experience.  It depicts impossibly conjoined male-female twins, their faces smudged and blurred like Munch's scream, a vast bird with black and burning wings towers over them: though whether it menaces or shelters them is unclear.  (Wait, I just checked that again - it's definitely menacing them).  The interior artwork shows what appears to be a medieval engraving of a lion devouring the sun.  The track titles are printed black-on-charcoal.

  The opening track '...collapse' is blistering and deformed black metal, cloaked in noise and grime, like the ghost of a black metal track.  The rasping is back, still choked deep inside the mix and unintelligible.  This gives way to 'The Upper Hand' perhaps the most immediate and overtly beautiful of the album's tracks.  A see-sawing and very heavily distorted guitar/bass riff  rolls back and forth over booming military-style drums and on top of all of this is a startlingly melodic vocal melody.  It is a wonderful, hypnotic track - strikingly Genevieve's vocal is even more boldly placed in the mix on this disc than on the one previous.  But then comes the epically-titled 'Not Just a Break in the Clouds but a Permanent Clearing of the Sky'.  It is 10:47 of roiling, blackened feedback, shot through with screeches and snarls of static.  The vocal appears only twice, and then fleetingly, all-to-quickly consumed by the dense swarming of the track.  It is a fascinating but staggeringly unlovely track.  I can hear the clouds, or perhaps those are locusts swarming, but of the clearing of the sky, there is nothing.  The first time I listened to it it damn near killed the album for me.  Not because what it was doing wasn't profoundly effective.  It was.  That was the problem.  It really is a track that you need to be braced for.  It is followed by the comparatively brief 'Corridor de Perdition' which is a surprisingly delicate filigree of pure static.  No vocals, yet oddly appealing.

Things get gob-smacking again with 'There Will Be Blood' - all haunted vocals and shuddering organ drones - and perhaps my favourite track on the disc: 'Nothing Above or Below'.

'Primal Waters Bed' (at a herculean 15:39) returns to the howling maelstrom experimentalism of 'Not Just...' but does so far more satisfyingly - to my ears at least.  Vocals play a consistent and prominent role throughout and the song slowly looms grander and more terrible until it finally consumes the last of the disc in an apocalyptic gale of sound.

I have not yet heard their latest - 'Alight in Ashes' - but early reports (and a little sound-byte I sampled) point at it being a return to the sound of 'The Die is Cast'.  Perhaps it will necessitate a post all of its own.

Further reading about the band reveals that their music is concerned with a sort of non-being, of unbecoming: the loss of the self.  This explains the lack of album credits, band photos.  They seek to withdraw their identities from the music, leaving it to exist in and of itself, almost independently.  They do not perform live often.  Fascinating.

Menace Ruine are truly a union of irreconcilables.  They take sheer, overwhelming dissonance and marry it to the most exquisite of harmonies.  They produce music that sounds utterly ancient and yet could not have been produced without cutting-edge modern technology.  Their work is simultaneously repulsive and utterly enticing.  They are the last song of a dead world.  If 'Current 93' and 'Unto Ashes' are Apocalyptic Folk, then Menace Ruine are Post-Apocalyptic Folk.  They are the aural equivalent of staring into Nietzsche's abyss.  They are a masterpiece painted in bone-dust and clotted blood.

They are also a really hard sell: too out-there for most metal fans, not consistently black-metally enough for the black metal fetishists, way too dissonant for the neo-folk crowd, too melodic for the hardcore noise freaks.
Perhaps it would appeal to adventurous doom- or post-metal fans...perhaps.

Either way, if you're ever in the market for a French Canadian/Vegan/Industrial/Black Metal/Avant Garde/Ritual Drone/Noise/Neofolk duo - boy, have I ever got a deal for you.

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