Review by Rexorcist for Ruins of Beverast, The - Blood Vaults - The Blazing Gospels of Heinrich Kramer (2013)

The Ruins of Beverast marathon #5 - Blood Vaults

I knew this was going to be a turning point for The Ruins of Beverast.  From what I understand, much of the black metal sound has been degraded to an amplifier for other doomier projects, but I really wanted to see where this was going to go.  Considering RoB's love of the random, I would either love this or hate this.  I currently consider The Ruins of Beverast one of the greatest black metal acts of all time, but I'm not as familiar with his doom music.  Let's see where this goes...

So the spoken word intro wasn't anything special to me.  I mean, I fell like anyone can put together basic synths and a creepy poem together and open an album that way.  The fact that his segues on his debut album were so brilliant only make this worse.  Thankfully, the first song, Daemon, is there to fill in the emptiness.  It starts out as a black doom song but evolves into some oddly appropriate but totally new traditional doom metal for a minute before returning to blackened doom.  Daemon is yet another creepy, paced and cinematic whirlwind of organized chaos, and is a perfect opener to this album.

Maleficia starts out dominated by weird repeating vocal effects set to a slow and sparse gothic doom instrumentation, and even lets some effects take over the lead, almost like he's underwater.  The song gets a little heavier and black to blackness before taking a direct shift into high-pitched synths and post-metal slowness.  This flow is both calming and empowering at the same time, creating something completely new for RoB: a post-metal song, one that I honestly like more than most post-metal albums I've heard.  However, the genre-shifting is much more blatant, which can actually fuck with the flow for some.  I mean, this song REALLY challenges your dedication to Ruins of Beverast.  So the fatal flaw is that the serenity of it all is given very little room to breathe.  We have black doom, death doom and even organs near the end overtaking this, so it's a good song but a wasted opportunity for an incredible post-metal song.

We go back to roots here with Ornaments on Malice, which frankly has been done before: a black-death-doom hybrid song again, and it takes three minutes for it to really change pace.  But this time, it's a simple, monotone ring with more angelic synths and deep chanting.  Eventually the two distinct sounds mold together for something truly epic, if not under-explored.  This combination, however, is also bringing to mind the metal artist Hell, also known as MSW.  After that is Spires, which spends a good deal of time in the same old death doom territory that we already expect of him with very little to say for the melody, which means this fairly rhythmic track is mostly relying on a familiar atmosphere.  There are some weird and quirky moments, but nowhere near enough to drive the song for its 13-minute runtime.

So now I'm hoping A Failed Exorcism gives me something new, even if it ends up being a mess  I mean, 15 minutes wouldn't have been a daunting task back in Sheltered Elite.  The combination of gothic doom and death doom maximizes the effect of both aspects put together, even to the point where it sounds like THE SONG ITSELF IS ACTUALLY GONNA KILL ME.  There's even a touch of prog in the percussions during the breaks.  Three and a half minutes in, it takes a totally different persona as the funereal sounds drive a ritualistic drum pattern through another chanted poetic lyrics with some beautiful singing before returning to the original format again, only with the black doom aspects enhanced.  The next few minutes go back to balancing the two brands of doom with just as strong of an effect as before, allowing it to feel fresh after its many shifts, and ends with a purely death doom outro that ties all the shifts together in a simple, easy to follow way.  Excellent effort.

Next is the three-minute trial, which is all about monotone instrumentation backing up a whole choir.  It gets creepier as it goes along, adding new sounds in the background and slowly changing the drum riff to something more active and heavier overtime.  Following is another three-minute track, Ordeal, which is a pretty cool black metal track on its own but doesn't hold a candle to the best stuff on the album.  Finally we end things with Monumentum, which kicks us off as a with a symphonic funeral piece It switches to a purely doom sound pretty often, which means there are very few surprises left in store by this point.

Well this was a much more mixed bag of ups and downs than I expected.  The quality of songs took big rises and drops constantly, and some are just totally forgettable while others are flat-out amazing.  It says to me that the current incarnation of The Ruins of Beverast is done and shouldn't be pressed any further, so while there are some songs I'd definitely put on a greatest hits comp, I don't really feel like I have any reason to listen to this again.  So I think I'll give it the bare maximum for 3.5 stars: 74/100, as 75 would round to 4 stars.