Enter the Gauntlet

Ride for Revenge's grimey, raw blackened doom metal is an interesting oddity among the scene. I've said in the past that I'm skeptical of people just calling slow black metal as having doom influence, but for Ride for Revenge it's actually very appropriate. They take the approach of their earlier countrymen in Barathrum to an exaggerated extreme. For a good idea of Enter the Gauntlet's sound specifically, imagine Teitanblood playing Ocean Chief covers. But that's just a conceptual spin on it. As for the execution, Ride for Revenge have been rather inconsistent. When they hit, they hit hard. When they miss, they miss big time.

Enter the Gauntlet misses rather hard in particular. The gnarly guitar tone is real cool at first, but the riffs are also some of the most monotonous ones they could've come up with. The biggest offense in that area is the album's longest song "The Fog Is Green and Pungent" which just sounds like the band fell too far in love with Earth's "Ouroboros is Broken". "Victorius", one of the two other long songs on the album, ultimately succumbs to this fate as well just a bit before halfway through. When the songs get this long, the guitar tone just starts to get headache inducing which is a problem when the album winds up being 73 minutes long. The shorter songs aren't even worth remembering because of how dwarfed they are in comparison to the three songs that take up the majority of the album's run time.

If you're exploring Ride for Revenge's discography, Enter the Gauntlet is an album you can easily skip unless you're really into droney shit in metal. While it does contain the track "Frozen" which is easily the true highlight of the album, Enter the Gauntlet goes to show that Ride for Revenge should not write songs longer than 10 minutes.