VILLAINS (USA) – ‘The Road To Ruin’ CD

On their third album, Villains again vividly portray that most unholy of temples…the 21st century urban wasteland. “Road to Ruin” presents a new collection of eight hymns to the thieves, sluts, junkies, and degenerates that inhabit that realm and all the rituals of depravity in which they indulge. Here, the band mostly eschews some of the more standard punk elements present on their last album, although the gritty belligerence of the tracks still reveals the same influences. What remains is the distilled and potent complex blackened thrash for which Villains have long been revered. Indeed, “Road to Ruin” is the band’s most coherent effort to date.