Welcome once again, faithful ones. I’ll keep this short and sweet today; it’s been a long week and I imagine you want to get this party started as much as I do. So let’s get right down to it. You know the drill. The Metal: Fell Ruin’s To the Concrete Drifts. The Booze: Mother Earth Brewing Company’s Sin Tax.
The Metal: Fell Ruin’s To the Concrete Drifts
Detroit, Michigan’s Fell Ruin are an ambitious bunch. To the Concrete Drifts, the band’s first full length album, is an amalgam of just about everything dark and heavy that music has to offer. Equal parts black and doom metal make up the base of the album, driven by thick, guttural bass and earth-shakingly heavy guitars, yet the band also makes use of passages of both grinding death metal and acoustic beauty for added spice. Songs like “Spy Fiction Folds in Ready Streets” build and break, slamming the brakes to a growling crawl before ramping up and letting loose once more, while “To Wither the Golden Rose in Bloom” shows the proggier side of the band within its off-kilter melody and lilting guitar work. This is an album full of surprises, and it certainly surprised me when I found out something this good had sneaked under my radar for so long. Call me a believer now.
The Booze: Mother Earth Brewing Company’s Sin Tax
Sin Tax is something of a return to form for my contributions to this column. I have been trying to focus on less dark beer now that Summer is almost upon us and the temperature has been rising, but since this past week has been fairly cloudy and temperate in Southern California (thankfully), I decided to break out the old standard of an imperial stout this week. Vista, CA’s Mother Earth Brewing Company brings the deliciously sweet flavors and heavy body I’ve been missing. Sin Tax has a rich mouth feel and delightful notes of dark fruit and cocoa that give way to a peanut butter and malt finish. Everything you want in a stout, nothing you don’t.
And thus ends another celebration, with another week behind us. You survived this long and that should be cause enough for celebration. Let’s survive this week to come, too.
Cheers, and be good to each other,
– Vincent
