I wasn’t alive in the 70s, and I’m going to assume most of you readers weren’t either. Now if you are 1 of the 1,000 who click on this site daily who happened to be catching shows and buying albums in this glorious decade, feel free to correct me in the comments. I’m going to take an educated guess though that most of us weren’t alive then. That being said, every now and then, a newer band comes along who so faithfully captures the ethos and aesthetic of the era; one can’t help but wonder if they time travelled 50 years to spread the heavy, hazy gospel to a new century. Such is this case with today’s featured band, Ruby the Hatchet.
This year saw me go from a casual enjoyer of RTH to a full blown fan, thanks to 2 stellar sets I witnessed this year: The first as an opener for Candlemass and the second as part of Psycho Las Vegas. On the surface, the band came off as a female fronted Uriah Heep. This isn’t so much because of singer Jillian Taylor’s vocals, which have much more in common with Stevie Nicks or even Carly Simon than the bombastic pipes of David Byron, but the hard driving guitar-organ attack that backs her. In true 70s fashion, almost all of their songs are even heavier live than in the studio, where they showcase more nuance as songwriters and musicians. Look no further than their latest album, Fear Is a Cruel Master.
Despite being RTH’s first studio effort in 5 years, Fear picks up right where 2017’s Planetary Space Child left off. The band puts extra attention into every little detail of their heavy/hard/psych/groove amalgamation, emphasized by warm, retro production and subtle jam passages. “The Change” opens things in wicked fashion, boasting dark psychedelia and haunted atmosphere akin to the first 3 Blue Öyster Cult albums. The same can be said for cuts like the groovy “Soothsayer” and trippy “Primitive Man”, but the band never blatantly sounds like BÖC or any other 70s titans for that matter (not even Heep).
Some songs are doomier than others (“Deceiver”, “Amor Gravis”), but only in a tenuous proto-doom manner, not nearly as blatant as say Sabbath or Pentagram. On the contrast are some dreamy, and dare I say therapeutic ballads. “1000 Years” and “Last Saga” dare you to close your eyes and lose yourself to the mesmerizing guitar melodies and hypnotic grooves within. There’s a slight Coven tinge to their compositions, sans the occult leanings, if only for their contrast of light and darkness, AM and FM airplay traits, and so on.
If this were 1972 instead of 2022, Ruby the Hatchet would be playing large scale, open air, free love/drug freak fests in between the likes of Sabbath and Faces. And the crowds would be going absolutely nuts. I can imagine them now, losing their minds while under the spell of strong acid and metal in its most ancient form. It might not be the “safest” form of leisure by today’s standards, but nobody ever got anywhere by following the rules. That’s why RTH have made it as far as they have today: Rejecting modernity and embracing the traditionalism that without, none of us would be here with today. Not even I, typing out this review.
8 out of 10
Label: Magnetic Eye Records
Genre: Heavy Metal/Hard Rock
For fans of: Blue Öyster Cult, Uriah Heep, Lucifer