Review Summary: Refreshing Black Metal using a different song template
Picture of Winterblood - Herbstsehnsucht
Winterblood from Germany is quite a revelation – it’s mixing various styles and creating an identity, albeit mysterious and hard to gauge. This album has such diverse songs but do have a sullen thread of emotions in common, despite traversing various patterns and influences on this album. It’s DSBM with eclectic influences and experimental concoction, kind of like early Lifelover without the cliché template. The album is like pieces of melancholy and fragmented tunes conjoined, in a way that is also reminiscent of Woods of Infinity from Sweden. Every song brings its own element to the music, which is why I don’t tire of this album. This must be my God-knows-how-many listen of this intriguing disc. Just when I thought I knew what this narrow style had to offer, I came across this one.
The second song even has something that could be described as a Death Metal breakdown, a very cool one at that, with vocals coming close to growling but remaining mostly versatile with the Black Metal shrieking and improvisations, nothing over-the-top hysterical stuff thankfully, because that can sound quite jarring. That’s an interesting mention – jarring, this music is like that on paper with its disjointed, or so it seems, structures, but that’s the beauty of it, despite it all, it’s seamless in its vision and also something genuinely moving and coherent.
The artwork is colourful, as is the music, despite the inherent bleakness and depression, of autumn leaves on the verge of dropping. Almost all the lyrics seem to be in German and the album name ‘Herbstsehnsucht’ is the same moniker the vocalist uses. It’s an album of coincidences and ironies as events in life are, which is why in all its disparity, there’s a myriad emotions and not just one, portrayed ever so delicately and painfully on this album – it’s rare you get a translation into music like this. This is an album that begs for your attention and leaves you empty when it’s done.
