Band:	The Ruins Of Beverast
Album:	Rain Upon The Impure
Style:	Black metal
Release date:	December 2006

01. 50 Forts Along The Rhine
02. Soliloquy Of The Stigmatised Shepherd
03. Rapture
04. Blood Vaults (I: Thy Virginal Malodour)
05. Soil Of The Incestuous
06. Balnaa-Kheil The Bleak
07. Rain Upon The Impure

One of Germany's best bands in this day and age is The Ruins Of Beverast. With their amazing debut they already conquered my heart, and hopefully I was not the only one. "Rain Upon The Impure" is the follow up from that grand debut album and displays a little change of style. Of course, when one takes a look at the impressive discography of Alexander Von Meinenwald, the sole member of Ruins.., he would have expected already that the new album would not just be a blatant rip-off from the debut.

The new album slightly diverts in the sense that it focuses more on a dense and suffocating atmosphere, whereas the debut was organic and a lot more fast-paced. Obviously every listener has his or her own opinion about this change, and personally, it would not have been my change of choice.

But let's just leave that aside and take a closer look at the album itself. What we have here is an eighty (!) minutes long, dark and bleak piece of art. The riffs are long, black threads that slowly spin itself around your body and tighten themselves everytime you exhale. A density cloaks you and blind your sight, and a thick, black fog clouds your hazed mind. You reach a lethargic state of mind and float away. Male choirs and earth-wrecking screams shift between each other, but furthermore this album keeps going and going just to keep you in your trance.

As I said, I prefer the debut above this, but that shall not be the case of everyone. It is a hard and solid fact that this is another great album on its own, eventhough you really need to take your time to go through it all.