Reviews list for Marble Orchard - Ruminations of Ruin (2025)

2025 has seen me really stretch my legs in The Fallen clan for the first time. According to my spreadsheet I have hammered through ninety-four releases from this year alone. Ranging from sludge through to death/doom metal, there’s a healthy section of doom metal in there also. The two most under-represented sub-genres are clearly drone (not my bag) and gothic metal. The latter category has seen CoF make a couple of splashes in the pool before dropping out of rotation quickly enough, and to be honest there’s been little of anything else that way inclined that I have picked up on. A couple of weeks ago, that changed with the discovery of the bold artwork that adorns the cover of the sophomore release from San Antonio band, Marble Orchard.

The band have a dramatic logo, dressed in gothic font, much like the album title. Then we have the just as dramatic artwork, with its bold use of red against a backdrop of grey and black. Ruminations of Ruin certainly grabs the attention visually in the first instance at last. Musically, the bands sound fits the logo and artwork perfectly. Dripping with Type O’ Negative style vocals and littered with Swallow the Sun and My Dying Bride musings, it is soon clear that no curved balls are being served here. The vocals have been an on and off challenge for me in all honesty, and right now (for this review at least) I am onboard with their bellicose nature. They do sound a bit goofy at times still, yet for most of my listens through they have certainly settled nicely with everything else I am hearing.

It is hard still to not get too drawn into them ahead of the other activity that is being performed alongside them. The guitar sound is thankfully prominent also which does give opportunity to tear your ears away from the vocals for a few sections of each track. The riffs are big and crunchy, and the leads are sorrowful forays, leaden with melancholy as we would expect. The percussion does appear to have some challenges with the mix (what is going on with that jangling noise that intermittently appears on tracks, or is that just me?), but still the drum work is commanding. The organ on tracks like ‘Anti-Mirth (Anhedonia)’ adds lashings of atmospheres and that taught sounding bass also helps here.

The main problem I have with Ruminations of Ruin is that it is just too long. The intro track is instrumental and takes forever to get through and then another two instrumentals at nearly a minute each at later points in the tracklisting don’t help with this sense of design triumphing over content a little. I get the album is a bold undertaking (I have called out all the signs of this already in the review), but it does seem that the band have gotten a little carried away with themselves here, and a trim would have helped. That having been said, there is still much to enjoy on the record. However, it has taken more than few listens to bed in, so it is not an immediate type of a record for me.