ALBUM REVIEW: The Ruins of Beverast - "Exuvia"

By: Conor O’Dea

Album Type: Full Length

Date Released: 05/05/2017

Label: Ván Records

 

“Von Meilenwald has created a terrible, tremendous and frightening invocation of blight and the invincible progress of erosion and disintegration. More than its component parts, an album to haunt the dreams of Lovecraft and Ligotti alike. Recommended without reservation.”

“Exuvia” CD//DD track listing:

1). Exuvia (15:27)
2. Surtur Barbaar Maritime (08:51)
3. Maere (On a Stillbirth's Tomb) (11:22)
4. The Pythia's Pale Wolves (14:34)
5. Towards Malakia (09:39)
6. Takitum Tootem! (Trance) (07:45)

The Review:

There is potential in corruption; there is creation in collapse. The Ruins of Beverast have built both brilliance and darkness amid the rubble of fallen stereotypes, and have generated horrific life within the cadavers of decaying subgenres for the last 14 years. For Alexander von Meilenwald, devolution, atavism, degradation of boundaries and borders represent always the opportunity for evolution, a cacogenic alternate genesis that reanimates what was once sterile with septic potential. Impurity and corruption are, of course, a running theme. The Shrine is Unlocked: from “Rain upon the Impure” and “Foulest Semen” to “Blood Vaults”, which invokes the tainting influence of the maleficar, rot signifies potency and possibility, an anti-hermetic immanence of putrefaction. The world we choose to not see, the world of the defiled, is Enchanted by Gravemould, as it were. Alexander von Meilenwald has time and again acted as ethnographer par excellence of this corruption as well as its agent and catalyst. His latest effort, “Exuvia”, both follows this teleology and transcends almost through a weird autophagic turn, sloughing off some of the worn Beverast motifs and arising anew; a corpse worm, a rotting phoenix.

What is “Exuvia”? An exuvia is the cast-off outer skin of certain insects after moulting. It is excess, it is waste, it is the left-behind. It is the carapace more often than not of carrion insects, those necrophagous creatures that speed the process of decomposition. Von Meilenwald harnesses this necrophagic power of the discarded in his own compositions to move beyond the symphonic corruption of “Blood Vaults” to what amounts to a fugue of deterioration: it picks up elements from across all his works, infuses them with shamanic chants to reassemble and reanimate a musical body that is both uncanny and weird. Uncanny in that it resonates with terrible familiarity. Weird in that it is alien, twisted and novel. From the fires of “Surtur Barbaar Maritime” to a song of stillbirth, from the attenuation of malakia to the unspeaking totem, Von Meilenwald has created a terrible, tremendous and frightening invocation of blight and the invincible progress of erosion and disintegration. More than its component parts, an album to haunt the dreams of Lovecraft and Ligotti alike. Recommended without reservation.

“Exuvia” is available here

FFO: Batushka, Bolzer, Elysian Blaze, Blut aus Nord

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