Review Summary: Besides sounding as a highly exclusive album, “Blank Language” contains everything a modern rock record should contain
The easiest and most apparent conclusion that can be drawn when having to deal with a record released in 2013 by a Greek band is to blame every spark of rage and drama on the recession. Ruined Families however, directly defy any kind of easily accessible conclusions in their sophomore album "Blank Language" - even though their “Athens without answers” bloodcurdling, repeated line in song “208” could have been the central catchphrase of every single protester in their country.
To define “Blank Language's” place amongst the rest of the band's discography, it is crucial to look back at last year's eponymous 7'' and also, at the ever-deafening “Four Wall Freedom” debut of 2010. And you don't need to be seriously observative in order to spot, that the only stable feature in anything Ruined Families have ever released is the intellectuality: it's obvious in the song-writing, it remains obvious in the lyrics and it gets physical on the artwork. All the rest (the sound, the production, the style) is subject to the band's intentions at the time. And this time, Ruined Families took the story one too many steps further.
In fact, "Blank Language" works as a vicious cycle within every song: most songs can be split in two parts, which are both triggered mutually, in terms of fueling different musical elements. From the harsh opening of "Only Need Is Real" through the melodic concluding "Pedestal", Ruined Families don't settle for anything less than everything. They present here their own, newly broadened context which encompasses everything and revisits nothing: an ambiguous black-metal touch which accepts symbiosis with a declared devotion to hardcore-punk paradigms, while the heartfelt screamo kind is messing up, almost flagrantry, with the finest moments of the noisy shoegaze tradition. It's the mind-blowing continuity effect offered by the triangle of "To New Parents", "208" and "Easy Livin'" and the crazy-ass dauntlessness in "Human Fence" or "Books As Weapons" that comes to define "Blank Language" as a head-to-toe compact record.
Ruined Families in the era of "Blank Language" differentiate from every other concurrent act, meeting the most eclectic requirements that one could have (a fact that probably justifies their recent sold-out London gig at the Urban). These Greeks use the vibrant content of this record in order to leave their track (and they do leave it) on the all-time creational map, disregarding the potential need of a shoegazing or post-punk artist to embrace melodic vocality, while still ignoring the ostentatious need of the brutal kinds to... "stay brutal".
Concluding, on "Four Wall Freedom's" successor, Ruined Families attempt to push the limits and they pompously succeed. And when the record is done -about twenty minutes later- all that remains is a coherent idea that "Blank Language" is an album that, if it doesn't rise to an instant hit soon enough, it will take its time to emerge as a definite classic record to look back at in some years: a clairvoyant piece of art, which makes it only harder for Ruined Families to invent ways to surpass, in the future, the completeness met on this ever-explosive record.
