Made Out Of Babies – The Ruiner

Made Out Of Babies, eh? The babies here could well be the members' other projects - Red Sparowes, Pigs, Clean Teeth and Battle Of Mice. What they've created here is something that approximates a twisted, noise rock/post-metal gremlin. On the opening tracks 'Cooker' and 'Grimace' vocalist Julie Christmas chucks her voice about like she'd rather not have it; like the very act of hitting a note repels her. It's almost a physical writhing entity in itself, crashing into parts of the song at different angles, before forcing itself back down her throat to gather energy for the next assault - a kind of blunt-edged, stripped-out Bjork.The dark matter of 'The Major' is something heavier and more expansive. It sullenly grinds a path down which Christmas spouts a dual vocal (one whispered, one spoken) and combines them into the soundtrack for a horror movie. All around her the lead guitar of Brendan Tobin and bass of Cooper build crumbling walls of sound. It's epic stuff, reminiscent of Isis, Pelican and even Meshuggah.'Stranger' is a nerve-jangling crashing of snare and cymbal, with an out-of-control vocal kicking and scratching before the guitar winds things down into a lucid rhythm from where the bass can rip out of the mix to bully the track back to a normalcy.The album artwork points us helpfully towards a conclusion. With Neanderthal hunter-gatherers and their prey combining with images of the moon and our travels into space it's easy enough to see how the music within provides something primitive (a grunted rhythm that speaks to our psyches on a simple level) and something cosmic (a soaring topline that allows our imaginations to wander).Whether the combination works is entirely a different matter. It's certainly hard-going, taxing the senses to find rhythms then destroying them piece by piece. There's also the fact that the hefty guitars tread all over Christmas' tinny scream in places - certainly they take a battering on 'Bunny Boots', 'Peew' and 'How To Get Bigger'. Cosmically, the album is a beauty, primitively it's a munter. 62%Made Out of Babies on Myspace