A few months after the excellent ep Takituum Tootem!, here comes the long-awaited new full length of The Ruins Of Beverast. Alexander Von Meilenwald, the German musician behind this project, continues with this fifth long-distance work the work of consolidation of a status resulting from a peculiar stylistic expression and constantly evolving. Compared to the ep are maintained the ethnic references referred to the culture of Native Americans, which in more than one song are manifested through ritual invocations and female vocals, all within a structure defined as black doom only to allow an approximate identification. In fact, the music of The Ruins Of Beverast goes far beyond any label, expliciting itself in a form that challenges conventions and banality, but resulting equally, absurdly, less difficult than you might suppose, by virtue of an uncommon writing ability that allows Von Meilenwald to place, in each track, key passages capable of fatally attracting the attention of the listener without any remission. The most striking example is the long title track placed in the opening, a magnificent ritual journey of over a quarter of an hour in which the obsessive notes in the background are repeated like a mantra, while the music floats overlapping voices psalmodizing or the more canonical author, who instead at other times of the album exhibits shades of scream and growl. The rest of Exuvia unravels between experimental hints, industrial flashes, dissonances that hardly dissolve in complete melodies but that always keep very high the load of tension, going beyond the hour of duration, something very close to an artistic suicide for anyone who was not able to exhibit the same clarity of purpose of the musician of Aachen. The album has to be listened to leaving the track by track logic, because it would diminish its wrapping impact, and getting to the new version of Takitum Tootem!, placed at the end, will be as challenging as rewarding. So, as the exuvia (the exoskeleton abandoned by different species of crustaceans, insects and arachnids after the moult), the music by The Ruins Of Beverast turns after each listening in a wrapping witness of a compositional inspiration that, at the same time in which it is detected is already moving elsewhere, ready to show further and visionary creative flashes.

2017 – Ván Records