Beyond The Pale – Monument In Time
Beyond The Pale – Monument In Time
Black Metal Archives
Release Date: 30/01/2026
Review by Jon Deaux
8/10
The new Beyond The Pale EP “Monument In Time” is basically a giant middle finger to the face of death itself. The band’s guitarist, Jeroen van Donselaar, died back in 2022 from a cardiac arrest at a gig. The guys’ tribute to him? “Fuck death, here’s a number of songs incorporating his riffs.”
“Monument In Time” is a title that sounds like the result of taking a thesaurus and mounting it onto a pneumatic drill and shooting it through a metal production factory in Sweden with a woman in the background ranting about parking tickets. However, I commend them for that and the mastering engineer Tony Lindgren at Fascination Street Studios for enabling the audience in this piece to hear the bass lines properly because in metal music, that is where the Conservative Party convention is taking place in the background—basically, where the bass is: it’s there; it’s just pointless what it’s trying to say. The bass lines of the musician in this piece don’t just reside in the background like a rock with no meaning; instead, they appear to get themselves all twisted in the midst of the guitars like an agitated serpentine rhythm.
The singing is done with unrestrained ferocity by Janneke de Rooy, who grates out the lyrics to these tax forms for individuals she just happens to dislike, but let me assure you, this singing is the highest compliment one can pay to death metal, in that this woman blows her top at realizing she can see her clamped car outside the hospital when the family member she’s at the hospital for is being treated for some serious stuff.
“Liberation For The Damned” bursts forth with all the finesse of a brick at a hospice window, with such a level of expertise with their riffing and drumming that it suggests a perfected sense of clockwork efficiency. Johnny Derechos hammering away at the drums has all the finesse of a man with a grudge at a brick at a hospice window, with such a sense of technical expertise that one cannot help but question whether he may not be a rather perturbed metronome that has attained a sense of consciousness and is now exacting revenge upon cymbals.
“Walk The Plank” adds a bit of atmosphere before degenerating into what can only be described as musical violence with a strong melodic bent. There’s definitely a pop hook in there buried beneath the aggression, and it’s pretty awesome – I mean finding out your serial killer has a talent for watercolors over the weekend.
“Facts and Figures” is simply addictive in the sense that you can’t really tell if you’re having the time of your life or if you’re simply experiencing Stockholm Syndrome in your relationship with your stereo.
Then, there’s “Payback Is A Bitch” which rocks hard enough to make you question if maybe someone in the group has been on the receiving end of the old proverbial and is just relating these semi-accurate attacks in the best way they know how – as thrash metal. The melodies cutting through the clawing torment with such finesse, like racing stripes on a ram.
The bonus tracks? You have the original version of ‘Storm en Drift’ that dates back to 2021. This means that what you get here is a ‘before and after’ scenario that can basically be described as ‘loud and angry’ vs. ‘slightly different. loud and angry.’
But of course, it is not. It is, in fact, a different kind of extremity altogether – one that is truly cleaner and more textured. One which is a lot more refined, refined to such a degree that it can be easily passed at a Christmas party or at least played at a home cookout. But despite its newfound polish, it is everything that ‘Facts And Figures’ was and so much more. It is a lesson in what it truly means to be beautiful and how to effectively flamboyantly unleash it out into the open so that it can truly marry and flow with a beat. It is a clear demonstration of what great, dancing, squirt-gun wielding abominations can truly do and what kind of cave of wonder and terror such beautiful extremities can lead to.
Which is probably why it is so effectively and simply superior to ‘Facts And Figures’; it is a work of love and a testament to everything that is possible and beautiful. It is a work of art in its most beautiful extremities and simply a work of extremity in its most beautiful form. It is a work of love, and love is extremity, albeit extremity with a higher power. It is ‘Facts and Figures’ totally superimposed and refracted and reshaped and repolished and reframed and remade and repainted and reminded and remade into what is most beautiful and what is possible. Which is probably what makes this remix of ‘Facts and Figures’ so extremely sad—and awkward for all involved.
They’ve chosen to work through their grief from losing one of their founding members in what appears to be this musical analogue to what I imagine to be what a circular saw might sound like if it were engaged in a perversely energetic sexual encounter with a line of Marshall amplifiers. It is therapy with a healthy dose of headbanging activity. Talking through feelings like some goody two-shoes basement dweller who never had the good sense to understand blast beats as therapy is unnecessary. The production quality coming out of this Mass Audio Studios in Utrecht is sufficiently good you can hear what each instrument is trying to murder you with.
There’s a cutthroat edge sharp enough to perform surgery, and there’s formidable force that could probably power a small village if you somehow knew how to harness it. Guitar work from Boudewijn de Kraaij and new recruit Geoffrey Maas is tight, technical, and at times beautiful, in that way extreme metal can be when it’s not just mindless brutality but actual composition.
It is not perfect-this is thrash and melodic death metal, which means it is not exactly reinventing the wheel so much as putting very aggressive new tires on a wheel that has been round since approximately 1986. You can easily hear the influences; this is clearly for fans of Arch Enemy and Dew Scented, and if you hate that style of metal, then this is not going to convert you through sheer force of personality. At five tracks plus two bonus cuts, it doesn’t quite have the heft to fully cement them in the pantheon of extreme metal immortality, though what is here is undeniably fierce.
But for what it is-a ramped blast of expertly played melodic death-thrash that’s drenched with both technical aptitude and true emotional heft-it’s a triumph. Its status as a living, breathing (well-recorded) memorial to a man who flat out died doing what he loved imbues it with poignancy most albums operating within the genre can’t achieve even if they spent ten years sobbing into their distortion pedals.
Beyond the Pale crawled out of tragedy, picked up the pieces, recruited a new guitarist, and produced something that’s a fitting paean to their fallen mate while simultaneously trying to perforate your skull via your ear canal. Admirable. Proper metal. Worth your time and your damaged hearing.
TRACKLISTING:
01. Liberation For The Damned
02. The Age Of The Pariah
03. Walk The Plank
04. Storm en Drift (2023 recording)
05. Facts And Figures
06. Payback Is A Bitch
07. Storm en Drift (2021 recording) – bonus track
08. Facts And Figures (Frost Rimix) – bonus track
LINKS:
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