Forte Ruin – Forte Ruin (Self-Released)

Tuesday, 11th August 2015
Rating: 7.5/10

With melodic death metal, after all these years, still a weakness for this scribe, its easy to be on the lookout for fresh talent for the subgenre. It often means that it takes more effort to truly impress, as it wasn’t too long ago that melodic death metal was the hot commodity (at least the more modern variety anways). The Finns of Forte Ruin are up for examination today, with their first self-titled EP.

The three tracks of Forte Ruin don’t take much time to get into. As with many of their countrymen, there’s a keen sense of melody to dig into. What keeps them from being a send-up of the countries most frequent fliers in this area (Children of Bodom, Insomnium, etc) is the way that their keyboards enter the mix. Occasionally epic sounding, but occasionally giving off more of a blackened vibe than the traditionally upbeat or melancholic varieties that tend to show up here. It also pops up with the riffing as well, with “45 Days” having a few moments that lead in this direction. Everything else tends to follow the melodic death playbook, but it is done quite well – particularly for a first attempt. Interesting guitar melodies, clean vocals that are catchy without pushing too far into commercial territory, and some rock-solid solos (see “Alienated Humanity”). It’s easy to fire off several listens in one sitting due to the consistency and strength of all three tracks.

Forte Ruin’s first release demonstrates command and understanding of what it takes to write some quality melodic death metal. As mentioned in the opening paragraph, it’s harder to impress nowadays within the genre, but Forte Ruin could become a larger name within the community with continued work ethic and growth.

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