Here’s the thing. You don’t just throw Ruins’ Cauldron in the player and casually listen while baking cookies in the kitchen, nor do you use it as background music for one of your mind-numbing knitting circles. It’s just not that kind of CD. Cauldrons must surround you, it must envelope you; you must ultimately allow it to own you before you are finally able to identify that sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach.

You see Cauldron is the big, scary, reclusive guy who lives across the street that rarely leaves his house, but goddamn does he make a lot of racket at night. Charred chunks of Celtic Frost and early Darkthrone are heard, yet touches of Tombs’ atmospherics are present as well, all rendezvousing to produce an album that weighs in at a tonnage similar in vague respects to primitive death metal, yet is genetically related to a species called black metal (either present day term or nascent period, before anyway actually called it black metal). Words are grunted out sparingly in vaguely Tom G. Warrior fashion and waves of pain are emitted through riffs that don’t so much cut and slash as blanket and suffocate. Chords ring out, at times floating and/or held in abeyance before let loose to join the absolutely earth-shaking rhythms. It’s akin to an indefinable, airborne plague hovering just above a smoke-billowing locomotive. Subtle hooks sometimes make their way into the compositions (e.g. “Suicidal Pulse”) and when you’re not quite ready for it the enormity of the crush creates panic seconds before one is overwhelmed.

So maybe the whole solitude thing isn’t your bag. In that case, play it at a near-deafening volume while driving through a destitute urban neighborhood on an overcast day, passing by weed choked sidewalks in front of dilapidated houses, every other block inclusive of an elderly widower sitting on the front porch as she laments a lifelong inability to buy her way out of an impossibly painful existence. Then you’ll know what I’m talking about.

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