  The Ruby Doe
The Flame
and the Fury
Burnout Records
CD Review by
Dave Liljengren
The Ruby Doe are
an incendiary noise-rock combo and The Flame
and the Fury is the apocalyptic manifesto of
this Seattle trio's pyromaniacal obsession.
Featuring eleven carefully-arrayed songs which
build upon each other and transfer heat one to
another like combustible beams undergirding a
ceremonial pyre, The Flame is a
masterpiece drawn in rich red flares of anger,
luminescent orange bursts of disaffection, and
charred black lumps of extinguished passion.
While many bands
are content simply to push the limits of their
chosen genre, The Ruby Doe immolates whatever
parameters of structure or restrictions of
intensity they happen to encounter. Vocalists
Aaron L and Jesse Sea deliver their urgent chants
of doom as the chaotic shouts of rescuers lost in
a torched warehouse. They scream for others to
save themselves even as they beg for their own
deliverance. Sonic walls of guitar, piano, tape,
trumpet and drum noise augment the dysphoria
suggested in such verbal pleas by punctuating
them with clarion shrieks of distortion embedded
among accelerating rhythmic thunderclaps.
With that said,
it must be noted how The Ruby Doe are able to
begin with a stentorian hullabaloo and end up
with something like art. Anyone can make a big
noise. The artist's mark is placed only when the
noise is tweaked, shaped and directed into a form
which reflects, enhances, or teaches something
about, lived experience.
Though the
desperate figures locked in superheated lives at
the epicenter of The Flame and the Fury
skitter in and out of the listener's
consciousness quickly, the intensity of their
emotions and the vividness of their realities is
immediately apparent. Listeners not flattened by
the instrumental howl will want to share in the
disaffected rants delivered by these characters.
It is not just the fact that Ruby Doe characters
are obsessed with blood, sex, grease, engines and
fire that sets them apart, it is the severity of
their affection for such hazard-strewn tableaus
which makes them unique in the annals of popular
culture.
If you will but
strike the match, The Ruby Doe will set your
imagination aflame. I urge you to do so, but go
carefully. Internal fires of this magnitude can
not always be contained.
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