My Ruin (review)

My Ruin are probably the band in today's musical spotlight with the most apt name ever. And that's not a good thing, by the way.

This four-piece (at last count) collective describe themselves as being "a band that hates to be labelled and refuses to play the mainstream game of radio-friendly fast-food commercial music." In translation, this means that they're yet another trendy metalcore act but refuse to admit it because otherwise their legions of Kerrang-reading fans might feel they're selling out. They consist primarily of one Theresa Beth, an ex-rapper who goes by her old rap pseudonym "Tairrie B" since her real name is an anagram of "Sheetbreath," and her significant other, a guitarist named Mick Murphy. The rest of the band consists of a pair of pretentious shitehawks with beards that make their chins look like scrota.

And, in case you've not picked up on it by now, My Ruin are the very essence of illegitimate arse cancer.

Seriously. This bunch of barefaced bandwagon-jumpers generate music that consists of co-opted glam rock riffage downtuned somewhat to create a general feeling of formless teen angst while Theresa or Tairrie or Miss B or Blasphemous Girl or whatever she calls herself these days blurts - not sings, death-grunts, or rasps - but blurts, like she's trying to expel a particularly tricky half-swallowed bit of burger from her trachaea, horrible excuses for lyrics full of pretention and expletives about how nobody understands her or how everyone hates her and suchlike. She then packages this formless wall of irritating crap in apparently ironic religious imagery and, in a merry jaunt from label to label, releases it on an unsuspecting public, who, for whatever reason, buy it by the bushel, despite the band's complete lack of anything resembling "originality" or "talent."

Actually, that's not strictly true. The guitarist can play, after a fashion, but any essence of skill he may have is soon washed out by the dullness of the material on offer, most of which would have been musically inventive had he dressed in tight Spandex trousers and played it in the 1970s. Acquire (by fair means or foul) the My Ruin track "Made to Measure" then the Aerosmith track "Let the Music Do the Talking" and compare the guitar parts on each song. There is an incredible similarity, you will find. And it's not just a one off. Listen to any glam rock band and you'll find some very strong similarities indeed.

Now this would be okay if My Ruin were glam rock, but they aren't, and as such we are subjected to the horror of Theresa Beth's voice, which is irritating beyond belief. It could drive you to suicide all on its own, even if it was a ridiculously upbeat Europop jobbie she was blurting out. It alternates between oh-so-ironic "little girl" type singing and the Daughter of the Cookie Monster who is also the Bride of Frankenstein. She vomits her horrible, horrible lyrics all over us, the hapless listener, and they come out coated in the black mucus of someone who smokes a pack and a half of cigarettes a day just to add a bit of frisson to the proceedings. One reviewer on a metal webzine even thought that someone had technically edited her vocals to make them sound that bad.

Though, to Theresa's credit, her incomprehensible blurting thankfully obscures the worst aspect of the band's works - the lyrics. These are BAD. They embody every possible cliché about all the most unsavoury aspects of the nu-metal and emo scenes, add a spot of fucking and cunting, and then remove what little artistic value the result may have had. It's not inconceivable that someone's hacked the Alanis Morissette Lyrics Generator to produce My Ruin's attempts at it. Though on the good side, if you have a large bottle of Pernod or other gutrot with you when listening to their albums, and you take a shot whenever the phrases "I bleed for you," "Hollywood is full of shit," "Stick it in me," or variants thereof, you might end up pissed enough not to consider suicide just to escape her blurting by the end of it. All you need to know about the band's usual lyrical themes can be summed up by Theresa Beth, in an interview with Bizarre magazine in 2005, she claimed that the biggest lie she ever told her mother was "That I forgave her." So generalised mascara-laden teenage angst then, wrapped up in pretentious titles like "Post Noise Revolution," "Blasphemous Girl", and "Stinkface" (yes, really.) Not that Theresa has anything to be angsty about, she's forty years old and probably making a nice little sum fleecing teenagers' parents out their hard earned cash.

Oh, and I know that for a fact, because, while the carefully constructed press releases you will find on their official site may claim to the contrary, it's plain to see that Theresa is obviously out to cash in on the latest fads. For instance, her musical career started in the late 1980s with rap, where, under her ubiquitous pseudonym Tairrie B, she released an album called "Power of a Woman" which was endorsed, apparently, by Eazy-E. However, as grunge happened and the so-called "alternative" started to infiltrate the mainstream more, she jumped ship and started up a nu-metal band called Manhole which later renamed itself to Tura Satana, after the Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! star. Needless to say, by 2000, the nu-metal gravy train was running a bit dry, and "screamo" was on the up, so she started My Ruin as a side project to cash in on it all. Needless to say, by this time next year or the year after her and Mick will notice the next rising star in the alternative, or rather, mallternative, scene, and jump ship for that. Speaking of which, she and Mick have a side project called "The LVRS" which is some sort of spoken word thingy and this leads me to believe that she probably fancies herself as Sylvia Plath, or probably just fancies herself for that matter. Which, along with the fact that she's twice my age (and half my maturity) sort of leads me to the conclusion that this whole belated teenage angstbucketry that she seems to be projecting is all, well, put on. Hopefully this talentless, soulless, faceless corporate whore will take the Sylvia Plath imitation to its logical conclusion before too long and kill herself. Although, on second thoughts, I'd rather she didn't, she might become a martyr for baby goths everywhere if she did. My Ruin truly is music to self-injure to.

Thus, in conclusion, it's evident that this band are best avoided, and that if Theresa was being honest when she blurted, "I will suffer for my lover, I will suffer for his sins," then let's hope that Mick Murphy robs a bank in the near future. Apologies for this being a bit of a rant, but I feel that the good citizens of E2 deserve to know and accordingly, if you disagree, please feel free to /msg me with your reasons why. However, if you're drunk, or you want to atone for something nasty you did and according want to suffer (in which case I exhort you to get them off p2p so the band don't gain from it) My Ruin's CDs are as follows, excluding compilations:

* = I told you they were pretentious gits.