Amber Asylum is a group known for experimental and avant-garde sounds mixed with a healthy dose of romanticism. The San Francisco-based group often goes through changes in their line-up, with the main constant being the leader of the group, musician Kris Force.

Amber Asylum has existed for close to 30 years, with their first release coming out back in 1996. Although much has changed about the world and the sphere of music since their forming, Amber Asylum has stuck to its guns and continued to create on the darker side of experimental metal. This dark side, however, always seems to offer a certain intimacy that many metal-oriented bands seem to miss the mark on.

The release of Ruby Red stands as the ninth studio album for Amber Asylum. Ruby Red includes all of the hallmarks one familiar with Amber Asylum would come to expect. Ethereal vocals and deep grating strings make the audience feel as though they’ve been dropped without warning onto a 17th-century ship full of damned souls. Sailing towards a definite yet somehow beautiful doom.

Every track on the album utilizes these droning strings, and they eventually become paralyzing. The strings seem to cut through the listener’s head in such a way as to seduce them into tranquility. The trick here, however, is that with this tranquility also comes a very real sense of unease. One begins to feel every movement of the bow, every inch of friction against the string, every sporadic hit of the drum. The final piece of this immersion comes with the celestial vocals added by Kris Force. The addition of these vocals is yet another layer of false repose for the audience to latch onto.

Overall, this album would do wonders as the score to a movie about Vikings sailing to their death. It accomplishes the task of mood-setting competently. However, if one were to complain about this album sounding a little too similar to the rest of Amber Asylum’s releases, it would be a hard point to counter.