I hope the reader will forgive me for temporarily ascending from the sewers to cover what potentially might be the one high profile release of what is traditionally a dreadfully slow month. I´ve been fond of The Ruins of Beverast ever since they dropped the raw schtick and started making actual music somewhere around the time of Foulest Semen of A Sheltered Elite and overall, The Ruins of Beverast has only gotten better since then, always pushing forward and finding new angles to their already quite singular sound. The almost EDM, trancelike structures (the electonic subgenre, not the state of consciousness) that the songs are built around with a devotion to investing time into a subtly building intensity, both structural and emotional, is something that many black and doom acts think they´re doing, but few are actually understanding what it entails in the way The Ruins of Beverast do – and even fewer succeed.
Tempelschlaf sees the band make deliberate adjustments to their sound. The Ruins of Beverast aims to perform live more consistently – understandably so, as that is where the money is nowadays. To make performance easier, they deliberately structured the songs on this record differently than they usually would. In practice, this means that the band eschews using as many samples, backing tracks and electronics – which I dislike – while potentially paying more attention to aspects of performance, like drum variety or the interplay of guitars – which I do like, conceptually at least. While some of these are appreciated, like the two guitar hocket in the mid-section of “Babel, You Scarlet Queen!” or the more fluid drum fills over the course of the whole record, I feel this overall cheapens the impact an album by the The Ruins of Beverast could have – or the legacy of the band itself, for that matter. I´ve seen this new album compared to other more palatable extreme metal acts like Behemoth, and while I overall don´t feel these comparisons are warranted, I still can´t help feeling disappointed by what we got. Making a more palatable record would be fine, but the band hasn´t really let go of the epic scale of their other records and could likely benefit from trimming, tightening and chopping things off, ideally from the rather slow first tracks of the album. I haven´t felt any bloat on any other The Ruins of Beverast album before, and the band introduced this risk by adjusting their style, immediately falling into the same trap that many other highly popular extreme metal acts do.
