The Pornography of Ruin is a remarkably balanced album when it comes to its harsh metal aspects versus the clean, ethereal passages. While there are riffs in the technical sense, the metal side is less concerned with getting heads nodding and more focused on sludgy guitars as an extension of the percussion, tying them for the most part directly to M. O’Brien’s measured drum strikes. This makes for a punchy, minimal-leaning backdrop for J. Andrews’ course, workman like vocals. The result is almost as much sculptural as musical, with heavy lumps of sound filling space but maintaining room to move between. Each track inevitably follows a path of least resistance to at times long stretches of clean guitars, white noise synths and pulsing electronics. A good third of the album could be categorized as ambient, including the second half of opener “I Am Without Heaven and a Law Unto Myself” and the entirety of “The Sound of Kindness In the Voice.” Standout track “By This You Are Truly Known” includes an extended melodic bassline that, when combined with the whisper-singing of Andrews, conjures the slowcore of early Low.
No one will be shocked more than myself to hear that I find these non-metal passages the most affecting moments on The Pornography of Ruin. While most of the album gives both harsh and clean elements equal time, ambient/drone track “The Sound of Kindness In the Voice” provides a gauzy, hypnotic surface to rest upon for eight and a half minutes that somehow never grows tiresome. HUSH successfully overlay these nebulous patches with a skeletal structure that keep things in the same realm as the album’s other material, but their most complete integration of all the ideas bouncing around The Pornography of Ruin is easily on “By This You Are Truly Known.” Much of the song’s success is owed to the gently heartbreaking stretch alluded to above, but HUSH also manage to put the big, sludgy bits in the right shapes and places to compliment the atmospherics. This can’t always be said of other tracks.
When it comes to sludge that depends on such a stripped-down, noise-like approach, it’s important that the band in question maintains a live-wire energy to animate the minimal material. HUSH, for the most part, doesn’t do this. At least not on record. There’s something about the harsh metal elements on The Pornography of Ruin that feel like rote recital. It’s not that they shouldn’t be there; the ambient/drone/post-rock components rely heavily on that counterbalance to successfully land. Rather, the metal elements don’t feel as lived-in. Closer “At Night We Dreamed of Those We Were Stolen From” comes closest to the success of “By This You Are Truly Known,” but again it’s the long clean stretch that does the heavy lifting, and that is even partly riding on the goodwill built by the purely ambient track before it.
HUSH have provided some mesmerizing moments here, but, and I can’t believe I’m saying this as a massive genre fan, it’s the sludge aspects that hold the album back from the heights it could have reached. On paper, I should love this, and it could always grow on me, but the heaviest parts of The Pornography of Ruin feel flimsy, while it’s the clean, quiet passages that hold all the weight.
Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self Release
Websites: hushdoom.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/hushdoom
Releases Worldwide: June 24th, 2022
