The Black Dahlia Murder
Ritual

September 2011
Released: 2011, Metal Blade
Rating: 4.0/5
Reviewer: Metal-Rules.com UK Team

The Black Dahlia Murder are a band whose raw power and aggression is best heard through a pair of headphones. You play it through your CD player and the album sounds like a mouse who has just taken a cyanide pill.



If The Black Dahlia Murder where to play the main stage at Download, the crowd would not be able to connect with it. But if you listen to the amazing new album Ritual through an Ipod and turn the volume all the way up, you will have never had heard anything as Brutal in your life. With groove filled beat-downs, pounding blast beats and one of the scariest voice metal has ever seen, the almighty The Black Dahlia Murder are back with album number five, and yes, they sound as heavy as ever, but even fucking better!



The music is always charging forward, delivering a fist pumping, head banging journey through each song which never slows down or looses it’s heaviness. Compared to previous The Black Dahlia Murder albums; Ritual has a sense of everything being more ‘mainstream’ on it. The production on this album sounds a lot better than on previous efforts Nocturnal and Miasma, giving sounds like ‘Moonlight Equilibrium’,‘Conspiring With the Damned’ and ‘Carbonised in Cruciform’ a larger sound to this mosh pit igniter jammed album.



There is not a dull moment on Ritual and even though the music is super heavy and capable of blowing your ear drums wide open, the tracks on this album are something that all metal fans can enjoy. This is all down to the excellent musicianship of the guys in The Black Dahlia Murder and because they can place some guitar solo wizardry, modulation, song structure and catchy verse’s and chorus’s into their music - The Black Dahlia Murder really set themselves apart from other deathcore bands on the circuit at the moment, making them the BEST band for writing killer deathcore songs which Ritual is chocker block full of.



With Ritual you do get the feeling that The Black Dahlia Murder have decided to go for a darker and more meaningful approach to this album, and when you get past the quite occultly title, the songs really show just how they have eventually fallen to the ‘Dark Side’ in the ten years they have been writing music. When you listen to up in your face, bordering on black metal songs with titles like ‘On Stirring Seas of Salted Blood’ and ‘Malenchalments of the Necrosphere’ you know that this Ritual is not your average Christian bum-chum get together, but a tribute to the gods of chaos themselves.



Ritual is one of the heaviest mosh fests of this year and with twelve killer no filler tracks of pure dark death metal, The Black Dahlia Murder are a band who deserve all the best in life, and hopefully with Ritual we will see The Black Dahlia Murder hit the big league with full brutal force!



Review by Matt Seddon