Ruby Red by Amber Asylum

“In times of trouble, women have often had to bear an even heavier burden throughout history.”

Troubled music for troubled times, Ruby Red is the tenth full-length album by Amber Asylum, an all-female quartet founded in SF in 1990 by composer, vocalist, and multi-instrumentalist Kris Force.

Neoclassical dark ambient moroseness from cover to cover, the album opens with an instrumental overture before the album’s first voice emerges in the dirge-like title track, “Ruby Red.” Evoking blood and hellfire across its imagery, lyrics, and tone, the songs’ sawing strings and pining vocals are undergirded almost always by a cavernous rumbling bass, borrowing a tonality adored by doom metal fans. Adding to this melange, the group also lightly incorporates modular synthesis, most cunningly on “Azure,” an amorphous piece that rises, ambles, and then spasms into dissonant registers before collapsing.

Amber Asylum has collaborated throughout the decades with members of Swans, Neurosis, Weakling, Hammers of Misfortune, and Vastum, and—on Ruby Red—their experience shows.

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