BEAUTALITY - Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph
In the beginning, life used to be easy. There was hard rock, and there was heavy metal. Then, some time into the mid-Eighties, things started to get more complicated when thrash, death, speed and black metal entered the game. And nowadays, frankly, nothing is that clear cut anymore, and everything is permitted. In the case of Beautality, the brainchild of London based musician D.M. Ravengarde, we are in the presence of atmospheric post black metal, which means nothing and everything at the same time. And while music was easier to grasp thirty years ago, it also has to be said that nowadays the listening experience can be much more suspenseful.
Beautality was founded in 2009. The debut album Providence came three years later and used every minute that could fit on a CD. The next record was planned to be an EP, but then everything turned out different. Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph may only have six tracks, but they are without an exception very long. The opener Einfallen is still relatively short, in the context of the album, as it is just running shy of thirteen minutes. The following Doppelgänger is the second shortest track, already well over sixteen minutes long. The remaining tracks are each about nineteen minutes long. And this is why the EP mutated into a double CD album.
It is mostly the territory of progressive rock bands to come up with twenty minute epics, and the best ones (Van Der Graaf Generator and Genesis) were always taking up one side of a record, while the other boasted shorter tracks. When bands decided to go full out with long tracks on double albums (Yes’ Tales From Topographic Ocean, Soft Machine’s Third), the results were always mixed. Fortunately Beautality’s Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph can be considered quite a success, even if it lacks the final touch to make it a work of genius. The post black metal label makes sense, as Beautality use the trademarks of the thinking men’s black metal genre (Enslaved, Emperor, Satyricon) and enhance them with influences from all over the metal world. There are elements of doom, death and gothic metal added to the blacker touches, all of this happening in the context of a single song. It goes without saying that such an approach demands the listener’s undivided attention, if they really want to capture all of the ideas that went into the songwriting. And I do wonder if people still have the patience to listen carefully to an album that is longer than your average movie.
I do urge you to spend more than just a cursory moment with Einfallen: A Tale Ov Torment & Triumph. If you think that the best ideas are already done with after the first two “shorter” tracks, you are mistaken, as especially the middle tracks The Devil’s Elixir and From The Abyss have so much more to offer, partially thanks to their generous lengths. The pace is quite unpredictable. Most of the time Beautality is running at a moderate pace, at times it is slowed down, but they are also not afraid to add some really upbeat parts. A closer look at D.M. Ravengarde shows us a guy you normally wouldn’t expect to be playing in a black metal band, but then especially these days we really need to get rid of the prejudices and applaud this adventurous artist’s vast and unlimited musical vision.