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Band: Beautality
Album title: Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph
Release date: 16 March 2015
Label: Nordavind Records
Tracklist:
Act One: Torment
I. Einfallen
II. Doppelgänger
III. The Devil's Elixir
Act Two: Triumph
IV. From The Abyss
V. Messias
VI. Unreality
The first thing that attracted me about this London (UK) based band was its name and I wonder how nobody ever came up with something alike before. I know that, like it happened to me, you'll be wondering if this act plays some kind of brutal death metal, maybe funeral doom or on the other hand something dreamy, romantic, gothic, a countless options huh... The truth is somewhere in the middle as Beautality by uniting two different opposites in their sonic output creates a convergent sound that has a lot of potential to appeal to a wide spectre of listeners. Beautality is most of all the creation of multiinstrumentalist, composer and vocalist David Ravengarde who in my opinion will slowly become recognizable as one of the best authors when it comes to metal with great epic and atmospheric proportions. So, here it is Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph, a magnificient opus that was initially intended to be just an EP but its vision and scope far outgrew it's inception and became an incredibly ambitious concept album, a true musical journey divided in two parts, Torment and Triumph, with six tracks that exceed 100 minutes of playing time (!).
Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph is a second album for Beautality who already with the debut album, Providence, gained quite a lot of interest in the metal underground media. This time everything reached higher grounds and new songs are much more refreshing and if the debut album didn't already melted down all the genre boundaries this one certainly does. Imagine now a marriage between Dimmu Borgir and The Sisters Of Mercy, or a bastard child made in an "innocent" encounter between Enslaved and early era Tiamat, then try to add some genes of Opeth, Satyricon, Mayhem, Paradise Lost, Alcest, My Dying Bride, maybe spice everything up with a little bit of Cult Of Luna and Arcturus,... yeah, I could add many other honourable mentions in here, but yet Beautality has produced kind of its own sound. Albums like this need your full attention and willingness to spend some time on it to fully embrace what it has to offer. Not to mention that artists always undergo a big risk to become monotone when they create such long songs, in their case all are somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes long, but Beautality are masters to keep everything as much flowing and dynamic as possible. All those perpetual swings from one mood to another in this tricky dark world that leads a listener from harsh extreme metal, evil and eerie black metal atmospheres, post-rocking soundscapes, through gothic scenery and monolithic doom metal walls of sounds are so smoothly put along each other. The sound is often rich and dense, just have a listen to the mesmerizing "Doppelgänger" where all of the elements counted before are so vivid and fluid. There's often such a captivating melody connecting everything together and keeping the sound catchy. The pounding, sometimes almost violent drums are in a very nice contrast with gothy, lush and many times almost solemn keys, not to mention the strong vibrant bass lines and then the sweeping guitar lines and many times elongated riffs, plus occasional acoustic grips converge and breaks out the darkness of the night, yet in an intriguing way makes an astonishing effect in this complex musical redemption. Not to mention the versatility of vocals, from many shades of harsh ones to clean and spoken ones, best shown when a strong feeling of pain is given to the one who dares to explore the mighty "The Devil's Elixir". Then how evil and abysmall it gets the ambiance on crushing "From The Abyss". Each of those six tracks is in a way unique in its own matter, bringing a deep emotional experience and limits of the mind and astral plane collectively. Fortunatelly the band also doesn't ruin the pace with unnecessary intricate and sophisticated technical embezzlements, but rather than that keeps everything going with the flow. And so it goes until the final notes of epic black masterpiece "Unreality" which will leave you hypnotized and wanting to take this journey through darkness of two divergent polarities, torment and triumph, once again.
What Beautality did on this record is without any doubt a very bold and ambitious experiment, thus a delicate one in its own nature. Thanks to intensity of arrangements and well thought production, not only that a record gained a lot of power, but as well it's reached kind of a rough edge that adds a special charm to already throbbing ambiance. Albums like it's Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph are made for satisfying the most demanding lovers of dark metal music who need some fantasy in the music they are willing to explore and for all those who like to be taken away by the ethereal, yet powerful soundscapes.
Review written by: T.V.
Rating: 8,5/10
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