Ruins of Beverast - Rain upon the Impure
March 22 2008 at 12:41:54 AM
With inspired equivalence, Ruins of Beverast’s lone creator, German-born Alexander von Meilenwald traces his music directly to its mythical origin: The name Beverast (known also as Bifrost) stands for the famed “rainbow bridge” linking earth to the realm of the gods in Norse cosmology, which is later destroyed during Ragnarök, bringing with it, “the collapse of the entire human organism.” Something of a mixture between Enslaved and Deathspell Omega, Meilenwald’s music is both “progressive” and partly obscene. His latest, Rain upon the Impure is composed of five tracks reaching 15 minutes a piece, the bulk of which, though solidly founded in Black Metal’s degraded idiom, overcomes this formula, creating an epic and varied portrait of conquest and mortality, told in swampy dirges by phantoms peaking along the Rhine.
”Who was to block the left hand path,
When it became the last resort?”
False angels and fleeing hope are voiced by jagged-toothed growls, medieval horns, ancestral choirs and sweeping melodies that crash into faint, drifting cries—all supported by the most involving use of film sampling since Scorn. The production has been criticized for being too thin and depleted, but its consciously self-muted presentation is appropriate for these considered and nearly symphonic arrangements. The album has a near-death weightlessness to it, an ablated masking of features that clouds its more visceral nature with subtlety and poise to convey the passing of time. How else to last through such absurdly drawn out divisions? It glides over abandoned battle fields with the far removed glare of death, and as an antithetical fantasia, is a strong exemplar of where the genre has been, and of the strange paths now formed ahead.
[Todd DePalma]
.jpg "Jailbait (NSFW)")
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