Black Christmas

Made Out of Babies
The Ruiner
The End

In 2007, vocalist Julie Christmas pulled off a neat trick - she fronted two very different metal bands on two of that year's most distinguished records, A Day of Nights (a startling debut from supergroup Battle of Mice) and main squeeze Made Out of Babies' sophomore effort Coward. On The Ruiner, she sounds more poised than ever, combining the creeping menace (and afffecting vulnerability) of her work in the former group with the more straightforward attack evident on the first two Babies albums.

The Jesus Lizard, who the band seem to take some pretty massive cues from here - were known as a "pigfuck" band, and that also happens to be the correct descriptor for the album's opening twenty seconds, as a repetitive, treated guitar figure skips along, accompanied by Christmas' alien squawk, until she lets out a proper scream and "Cooker" explodes into a stunning macabre rave-up, complete with cries of "run for your life!". From there the record seems doomed to have spent its energy, but that turns out not to be the case, as "Invisible Ink" and "The Major" pack in a surprising amount of pop hooks to go with those barbed basslines and dynamic vocal turns. "Invisible Ink," in particular, might go a little too far in an accessible direction for some fans to handle (much as some got a little queasy when the Dillinger Escape Plan released the swaggering "Black Bubblegum" last year) but it's hard to argue with a track that evokes the doomed grandeur of the Gathering while observing that "crawling on the floor has never been less fun."

The Ruiner can't maintain its momentum forever, as "Stranger" and "Peew" provide the same high energy as the rest of the record but fall short in terms of melodic craft, but the band find their footing again just in time - closer "How to Get Bigger" brims with Christmas' trademark biting condescension ("the world is just for you / but you don't want to take it / ah, you must be useless! / You must be lazy!") and the return of "Cooker"'s all-flattening sense of drive and purpose. I'll be shocked if there's a more flat-out enjoyable metal record released this year.