Review by Rexorcist for Ruins of Beverast, The - Exuvia (2017)

The Ruins of Beverast marathon #8 - Exuvia

This is the one moment I've been waiting for, the beloved 2017 Exuvia.  I'll have heard the last of RoB's rawest classics after this.  It really bit me in the ass yesterday when my internet was conking out and I couldn't listen to either Exuvia or the previous EP.  I really wanna know where this man decided to go after everything that's been going down and all the surreal craziness and evil that built his last three studio albums.

The title track out with a new direction for the tribal behavior of the previous EP, Takitum Tootem, applying the chanting spiritual vocals to a funeral doom sound that evolves into black.  The next couple minutesa are taking small but effective shifts into different black metal sounds to keep things original, drawing the listener into a dark netherworld after the chanting ends.  It seems to me that the black metal here is being used for more like a repeating ambient track rather than a melodic track.  Despite the fact that melody has worked out perfectly for RoB in the past, this decision is a perfectly fine one since it WORKS.  The repetitive hypnotism keeps dragging the listener from one surreal plain of reality to another.  By the end of this track, there's a very faint guitar melody drowned out by the repeating riff.  I'd have liked for it to be a little louder as the ending draws itself out a bit.

Surtur Barbaar Martime begins with one of RoB's signature funeral riffs, taking a direct turn into the black metal pretty quickly, relying on more energy than the opener.  The song typically switches between the two for aural effect, oftentimes being instantaneous but eventually being combined with meximum effect during the middle section.  This song is esentially a reorganization of the behavior of the first track with less of the tribal ambient and more of the funeral backdrops.  But since it shares so many similarities with the first track, I was really hoping for something different with Maere.  Starts out more or less the same way with a blacker energy to it.  Any ambient aspects are attributed to ghostly wails, usued for a mysterious Lovecraftian effect.  They're quite cool, but a little drowned out by the black guitars.  At least, this is true for the first half, which cranks up the volume on the vocals.  It seems that despite the shifts in these songs, the exact tone is much moe consistent.  The line between black and doom is much thinner here.

The Pythia's Pale Wolves starts up the second half with bagpipes faintly added to another typical black doom intro, but the percussion is tamer, less active and more focused on a specific slow rhythm.  The vocals are also more fit for doom as they're clear and harmonic.  This helps bring out another spiritual vibe that's much more relaxing.  I didn't expect this to last forever, though, as it eventually combines the funereal guitar tone with this, somehow making both the ambiance of the blackened guitars and the funereal sound much more energetic together rather than separate.  Even when the crystal clear female vocalizing comes into play, it revs the listener up.  The tempo and percussion eventually replicate the energy, pushing it even further as the power becomes too much to handle, leaving the harmonizing to balance it out.  This is a shift I can really appreciate as it keeps making something better out of a sound that, while still great, we've heard before.  This is the densest segment of the album so far.  This track really likes to challenge the perceptions of relaxation and extremities, as it's really the heaviest track on the album at that point but also has some very serene atmospheric moments created through these extremities.  But at this point, I also really need something different no matter how extreme it gets.

Towards Malaika only has about thirty seconds of weird tribal chanting, and I was pretty disappointment that it didn't continue for even longer.  So the most I could do was wait for something totally new to happen.  Although the beginning had a typical sound, the vibes are much more dramatic than the tracks before, thanks to a higher pitched sound-effect driving the background and amplifying the weird rhythm in the front.  After the dramatic intro, there's a switch into pure, uncensored doom, and this doom keeps us going for a while.  This to me qualifies as a difference because it's slow, stomping guitars are more true to doom's roots than anything that's been present so far, relying more on atmospheres such as tribalism or mysticism before.  The third act, starts with the chanting, and I was once again hoping that it would last a while, but instead it goes right back to the black metal, which kind of pissed me off.  This guy makes a tribal ambient EP, releases another album the next year and barely does anything with it.  It begged the question, why bother featuring it on this track at all???  The song ends with it again, but it doesn't have as strong of an effect as it should for me.  I was thinking to myself, this last track had better be phenomenal.

This final track, Takitum Tootem (Trance), goes right into the noisiest black metal guitars present so far.  This doesn't stop a melody from being made out, largely because the percussion is more rooted in dramatic effect and not speed. In this way, I'm given an effective black ambient track performed with metal instruments, like some black noise albums I can name.  This slower, doomier and noiser take on the Exuvia sound has increased the heaviness while still finding that perfect serenity through it.

This is a different type of album for Ruins of Beverast.  The songs each have their differences and their similarities, and because the songs are so long, the similarities kind of tested my faith in his ability to put out other songs.  Maybe this is the best course of action, as black metal and doom metal fans want many more atmospheres.  This is the perfect RoB album for those who favor atmospheres akin to his debut over the wild ever-shifting behavior of his second through fourth albums.  This album is ALL ABOUT the atmospheres.  Unfortunately, this fixation on metal atmos also wanes down the potential of the tribal aspects shown on the Takitum Tootem EP from the year before, even though it still makes short and effective.  So this is another fantastic release by one of Germany's best black metal artists, but also features a slightly missed opportunity that's not quite enough to knock a half-star down, but is enough for me to confirm that IMO this doesn't hold a candle to Sheltered Elite.