Reviews list for Ruins of Beverast, The - Rain Upon the Impure (2006)

Ruins of Beverast marathon #2: Rain Upon the Impure

Our opener is the 13.5 minute epic 50 Forts Alone the Rhine.  This would be his longest song released, so the chances of being totally monotonous were pretty high, unless BoR managed to keep it creative throughout.  I noticed variations in production quality between clear sound effects and slightly fuzzy production for the guitars, while the vocals are right in the middle of the two.  Nothing, however, gets in the way of each other, allowing these multiple elements to work in harmony while the unpredictability of The Mine is combined with the melodic charms of the earlier tracks on Unlock the Shrine, which makes this his best song so far.  I had been curious for a couple years about the combination of fuzzy and clear production and how to properly utilize it.  RoB answered my question, and I'm perfectly satisfied with the answer.  Add the fact that this is probably the creepiest song of his so far, then I would even go as far as to say that this is one of the greatest metal songs I've ever heard.

Next is a SIXTEEN minute track: Soliloquy of the Stigmatized Shepherd.  Damn... The song begins with a dirge of black doom that's more than eager to stomp you flat into the earth.  The doom switches between the death and funeral brands, allowing Frohn to add sparce moments of black growls and guitar effects.  These sparse moments aren't quite enough to make up for the otherwise lack in shifting behavior that the track is guilty of, as it has to compete with the previous song's astounding creativity.  But at the halfway point, our percussion largely ceases for a moment, and the guitar effects become alien and otherworldly, playing at a rapid pace.  The track then evolves into a war metal riff and blast.  The percussions are a little drowned by the riff, but the atmosphere is hypnotic.  We have a couple of minutes of this before the doom takes over again with a couple higher pitches and a more astronomical approach, and then goes back to black again with a slower but still energetic approach, which means our super-slow track is finally utilizing the creativity of the previous track despite its slightly overlong first half.  What a way to save it.  Now we just let the chanting and the psychedelic guitars take us away through the end.  Kick back, enjoy the atmos.

Track 3 is 16 minutes as well, and I've got some pretty high hopes for this one as track two came back with some punches.  Track two evolves into Blood Vaults with more weird sound effects, overtaking the guitars in both volume and focus.  Now things are getting multi-dimensional, like I've been pulled into a Stephen King shadow world.  This intro evolves into a very focused and melodic atmo-black track with the kind of aggression the album's been largely missing.  It even takes a moment to give us the obligatory nerdy Vincent Price sample.  For a while, the drums are hurt by the bad production, but after the sample they seem to be fixed, going at a perfect volume with the riff and some deep masculine choir singing.  Now this change in production wasn't really an "artistic decision" that needed to be there, as the worse production on the first act of this song did more harm than good.  But it's nice to have more balance back, and the melodies keep shifting with perfect consistency.  So Once again we have a flaw in a track's beginning while the song gets better as it goes along.

And now for the THIRD sixteen minute track in a row: Soil of the Incentuous.

...

SOILED IT!  SOILED IT!  SOILED IT!

Ahem, excuse me.  Now for this track.  It starts off with a standard black doom rhythm and riff, not really impressing me at first.  But I had already decided to wait and see what it was going to do next.  Once it upped the blackness, the rapid speed aggression brought more of its general evil out.  it remains standard until another vocal sample leads us to a gothic section with industrial noises to bring us a totally new sound and direction that the album hasn't explored yet, and it feels perfectly fitting.  But once again we're back to the plastic black metal after a couple minutes.  This track shows RoB being much more serious about the black metal aspects than he was on the previous tracks.

After a creepy dark ambient track that does its job but fails to hold a candle to its brothers from Unlock the Shrine.  This track shows RoB doing everything he can to make it an epic ending.  Even anything vaguely related to doom is relying on bombast here, which has largely been missing from the album so far.  Even when the industrial percussions return, everything is epic, loud and cinematic.  A plethora of different vocal styles comes in to aid in every piece of this album from mutant chanting to choirs to demonic growls.  I'd even say this is the second best song that I've heard him record so far.

I'm more than pleased with this sophomore effort.  There are a couple small decisions that shouldn't have been made, and there are a lot of seriously artistic moments that draws me into every angle of the individual worlds each track explores.  Rain Upon the Impure is proper black metal, but also acts as both a slow and fast cinematic exploration of what the darkness of black metal is capable of.  No wonder this is RoB's most popular album, it's a tornado of perfectly evil melodies and vibes.

I personally believe that the very best atmospheric extreme metal is not so much music that you listen to in the same way that you would tradtional metal like Iron Maiden, Slayer, Morbid Angel or Candlemass I believe, rather, that it is music you need to open yourself up to and allow it to become part of you, the quality of it being determined by how successfully the music meshes with your own psyche. To this end certain artists are supremely capable, Tobias Möckl of Paysage d'Hiver for example is a master, and The Ruins of Beverast's Alexander von Meilenwald is another I would venture to add into that select group.

TRoB is in essence a black metal project, but he also often ventures into the realm of doom metal, in particular funeral doom in the case of Rain Upon the Impure. He likes to slow down the blasting black metal to a crawl and when he does probably illustrates better than anyone the correlation between atmospheric black metal and funeral doom. For me, these two sub-genres have always been two sides of the same coin anyway, both capable of having a very similar effect, albeit arrived at in a very different way. He also seems to have a penchant for choral effects, whether it is the christian orthodox chants made familiar by Batushka, viking-style chanting in the vein of Hammerheart-era Bathory or the Gregorian chant featured in the title track.

Make no mistake, this is a very long album at almost 80 minutes, but it never once becomes tedious and as soon as it ends I am more than ready to take the trip again. The five tracks (excluding the two interludes) by virtue of their length, are allowed to develop and build to a maturity that lesser talent's works lack. They are in no way long for the sake of it, the tracks not reverting to the repetitive, hypnotic effect of a lot of atmo-black, rather they are each as long as they need to be to weave whatever tale and convey whatever atmosphere AvM is striving for and personally I wouldn't want him to trim any of them. The music is incredibly dark and dense, the sheer weight of the material feels like some overwhelming natural force of star-crushing magnitude and AvM's vocals are some of the most evil-sounding in metal which are thrown into sharp relief when set against the choral effects. Whether it's the heaving dirge-like intro to Soliloquy of the Stigmatised Shepherd or the blasting of 50 Forts Along the Rhine, the atmosphere is equally menacing and sinister - almost relentless in it's pulverizing effect.

What I like about The Ruins of Beverast is that, unlike so many other black metal solo projects, Alexander von Meilenwald does not feel the need to spew his every musical thought out into the public domain, but rather takes the time to work on his material until it is of sufficient quality to be unleashed on the unsuspecting black metal hordes. One listen to any of his albums tells you that the tracks are well-crafted and polished (in a compositional sense, not necessarily polished sounding) and are the product of a particularly creative mind who knows exactly how to get the most from his chosen medium. Rain Upon the Impure is yet more proof to me that, despite the many unoriginal and frankly quite dull acts, black metal is one of the most exciting and varied metal genres, still more than capable of issuing surprises aplenty. As a footnote it is also scientifically proven* that a Vincent Price sample makes an album about 12% more awesome.
(*may or may not actually be true)