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Darkest Hour’s MySpace headline is a life mantra: “Live to thrash/Thrash to live.” The band hails from the nation’s capital and has been brutally thrashing death-metal anthems into hardcore punk fervor for the past decade. Its double-bass pedal insanity antagonized by complicated tech-guitar work has pretty much become the model that every metalcore minion to date has tried to replicate. Hidden Hands of a Sadist Nation, the group’s 2003 effort on Victory, could have been a disappointing end point for the band, however. Despite cameos from such dark lords as Tomas Lindberg (At the Gates) and Anders Bjorler (the Haunted), the album sounded more like a Darkest Hour parody than anything else. It dumbed down the outfit’s potential and even bored old ladies. But the boys have bounced back. Released last year, Undoing Ruin does the same; it’s an unflinching metalcore delight that puts Darkest Hour back at the forefront of the genre it helped define.
