Ruins of Beverast aka Alexander von Meilenwald off of Van Records has created a damn fine metal album in Blood Vaults. Lots of black metal in terms of atmosphere and general feeling but he works in a lot of death metal riffing, vocals, and depth. Solid production, great musicality, and he knows exactly when to put the ambience and extra touches to make this go from a run of the mill but heavy album into a really unique effort with plenty of homage to the greats (then again Nagelfar is pretty great.)
FCCs: 2, 3 have medical sexual terms but honestly the vocals are 99% incomprehensible and I only found those two because someone posted some lyrics online.
RIYL: Nocturnus/Morbid Angel, Emperor, Blut aus Nord
Reviewed by Alsal.

1. Deep and intimidating voice, with organ-ish synths in the background. Intro track.
2. Church vocals and heavily edited vocals. Death metal growls, blast beats, and an absolutely brutal guitar tone make up the meat of this track. Breakdowns of whiplash quality. Middle part of the song slows down considerably with a bridge and glacially slow riffs. Middle-eastern sounding stuff is just fantastic. Pretty death-metal.
3. Distant acoustic and phaser’d vocals open this track up. The rest of the track is “massive” black metal (Emperor) meets the slow death-metal style riffs that are reminiscent of Morbid Angel.
4. Merger of tracks 2 and 3? Really getting a death metal/black metal vibe from the heavy riffing and atmospherics. Clangy guitar decorates the background and sounds pretty good. Relaxes into a cavernous and brooding section. Cavern bursts open with some more head-bangin’ riffs and some cool vocal effects.
5. Phaser’d vocals again telling a creepy story you can follow along in the lyrics. Slow and painful march into a more chugging section followed by a more standard Beverast brand of death/black. Some tribal drums are a nice touch later on. Tremelo picking rounds out the end nicely.
6. Distant acoustic in the beginning/as a bridge and then heavy riffs otherwise. Track ends up going full-Viking vocal and drum wise. I dig it. Reverts back to the beginning alternation, then some synth joins in. Slow riffs till the end.
7. On top of regular vocals, group chanted/church-style singing. Repeated and heavy guitar notes on this shorter track. Good tribal drumming too. A little sped up doom-y.
8. The shivering guitar tone of Blut aus Nord coupled with death metal riffing, of course. Female spoken vocals along with typical ones.
9. Closer track starts off with distant acoustic again. This is another kind of doom-y track but manages to keep the momentum of the album going and then dissipates it well while being extremely brutal. Acoustic bridge followed by the final slow march to the end.