Brooklyn’s Made Out of Babies seems to be the type of band that waits outside your house, kicks you in the teeth, and steals your car for a joyride down to the corner store to pick up smokes and porn. With their third studio album, The Ruiner, these punks aim to wreck your night and leave you bloody, battered and begging for more.
Armed to the teeth with crunching bass, filthy guitar, hammering drums, and Julie Christmas (more on her later), Made Out of Babies doesn’t just play music, they molest it. Unremitting chords, unsympathetic wails and shouts and screams, and the unnatural sound of song structures being torn to pieces fill the speakers with wicked delight.
The Ruiner finds Made Out of Babies fucking around with just about everything by way of song production. Tempos dissipate into to dust, guitars moan and chomp, and Julie’s vocals howl and bleat at times, only to return with diabolical shouts and shrieks seconds later.
Female singers in front of metal bands are an insufficiency. You have the quasi-operatic wannabes and then you have the few, valiant souls that can actually hang. Julie Christmas is of the latter camp and visions of her stomping Amy Lee in the gullet filled my head with sick satisfaction.
Between her diminutive girly sighs and her maniacal outbursts, Christmas places mild melody. She is beyond talented and she’s not trying to be one of the grunts.
The band's structure is as sound as anything. Guitarist Bunny, drummer Matthew Eagan, and bassist Cooper are a tight unit and their ability to stand alongside Christmas is insightful. Made Out of Babies isn’t just a set of transposable instrumentalists backing an enigmatic vocalist. Instead, the whole collective function as a unit and the music reflects that fearlessly.
Article comments
1 - Steve
Made Out of Babies - The Ruiner
Just caught wind of this band recently from a top releases list for heavy music, and the name intrigued me. With a name like that, I took them seriously. And after listening to this album, it is justified. You won't hear this kind of music often. The vocalist sounds like she's set you on fire and is dancing around you chanting - but in a good way.