Urfaust/Ruins of Beverast - Untitled Split
March 24 2008 at 07:16:48 AM
Sold only in select retail stores and at live shows in the last half of the year, this limited edition 7" brings together two of Germany’s most promising bands. Never one’s to fit easily into the narrow terms defining genre, the pair work adequately within the boundaries of Black Metal while somehow escaping the ordinary, both divided between interior and exterior moods of a violent and decaying world.
While Urfaust’s “Vom Geist Der Shwere” sheds the more harlequin tone of their previous efforts, the track still comes off like decadent theatrical performance. One drenched in an easy-flowing combination of mordant guitar and drums playing below Willem's cold, waning voice. A haunting soliloquy set free into a Salvator Rosa painting. But only a sample, which is far too unsatisfying.
Alex Von Meilenwald’s Ruins of Beverast reins listeners back into his perverse sanctum with “The Moselle Enimga…Is A Tale About All That Frightens Man.” As inclusive as it sounds, the music is colored by a montage-effect of Gregorian chants, swarming guitars, crackling fires and industrial engines breathing back heavily into a perpetual downpour of sound. Much like Beverast’s opus,
Rain Upon The Impure, the arrangement here is relatively simple, but evocative of so many things at one. Meilnwald’s brilliance lies in his talent for illusion, with his music taking on almost tangible as well as esoteric dimensions, as in a cave, or a church. It’s the quasi-religious, awe-inspiring character of his work (independent of the samples, still marvelously subsumed here) that allies him so closely with Black Metal and at the same time reminds you just how inept are Beverast’s contemporaries at rising to that same level. The final impression is that of scouring drops of acid onto the pate of a stone gargoyle.
[Todd DePalma]
1.jpg "Label Profile: The Ajna Offensive")
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