Review Summary: My very own summer record
You know it, I know it: black metal mostly is a winter genre. Apart from the sunny haze a band like Deafheaven invokes, the genre is filled with winter imagery, ancient nature, and lost souls' coldest depths. It would thus be fitting to release a black metal record during Winter, especially when your very own take on the genre is but a reference to the white season. Tobias "Wintherr" Möckl, sole member of Paysage d'Hiver - translated as "Winter Landscape" - thus chose to organize a listening party in January for fans to listen to his latest album before anybody else. This listening party preceded the album official release by five months, in June. Nothing could go wrong, right?
Right?
Yeah right. Thanks to Reddit, the listening party was described by an attending fan: people present at the event sat in darkness and listened to
Im Wald as well as demo material that didn't make it onto the record, ultimately receiving the album on a wooden USB stick embossed with a forest landscape. Reddit's OP finished his explanation of the event with a comment sniffing like impending doom:
It's only a matter of time before someone leaks it onto the web I think.
What a tragic self-fulfilling prophecy. Alas, in an age of morbid impatience and insatiable curiosity, it was almost doomed to happen. Wintherr shared his utter disappointment in people with so little respect to an artist's vision, but the harm was already done:
Im Wald, scheduled for June 26th, was available two months before for every lil hacker who knows how to use slsk. One might wonder: why, oh why did he want to officially release this album in June? Paysage d'Hiver's imagery is one of glacial forgotten landscapes and millenary woods, not one of sunny beaches and annoying mosquitoes. It turns out the June release is a testimony of PdH's attitude, Wintherr confessing "Yes, that takes time but also is an important part of our philosophy".
So, what's left of an album that collapsed in its introduction to the public? Well, although the album release is nothing short of incongruous, the music it contains never fails to summon freezing imagery. Opener "Im Winterwald" commences by a 25-second prologue of ice-cold wind blowing in your ears. The mood is set. Brutally, a storm of squealing guitars, barbarous blast-beats, and intense shrieking come blasting. Cymbals are hit once every four measures or so, the background of the soundscape constituting of synths casting symphonic waves upon the percussive winds and a rasping wall of noise. "Über den Bäumen" follows the same structure, starting its course with a windy prelude before escalating into frenzied madness. These first two tracks already show the real star of the record: the riffs. While previous records focused on making every sound you could hear background-y, the prominent force here is the way the guitar pound, the rest of the instruments and voices supporting its grandeur by adding layers. "Stimmen Im Wald" is a great example of that: chants initiate a doomy liturgy before the guitar takes the exact motif and transforms it into a disgusting riff, said motif being emphasized by synths and chants. Another ten minutes epic, "Flug", wields a collaboration between synths and guitar to repeat a heady leitmotiv.
But it's not all about the guitar: "Alt" sees an almost sweet synth melody counterbalance black metal's evil glory. Short dark ambient interludes "Wurzel", "Verweilen" or "Schneeglitzern" constitute breaks between the frenzied hysteria, accentuating the feeling of being trapped in a winter storm: sometimes the cyclone stops, and all you can hear is the wind threatening to run its course, and the sound of your feet roaming the snowy landscape. Elsewhere, Wintherr creates the unthinkable: a violin enters the album's course in "Le reve lucide", neither completely atonal nor entirely pleasing to the ear. This thin thread between the musically unlistenable and the emotionally moving is at the core of Paysage d'Hiver's aesthetic. This project is a living testimony of all things disgusting, from the decidedly crass production to the inhumane cries. It's thus striking how, more so than on any other PdH's record, the iconic dirty production manages to create beauty out of the ugly: riffs and synths chords are more memorable than ever, and never has the one-man-band sounded so good. Allowing each element to signify its presence, the refined production (it's all relative) is the crispest and most dynamic he's ever done. Yet, although this newest aesthetic approach is not as utterly unappealing as, say,
Winterkälte's, it does remain one of the most obscene recent takes on black metal. Wintherr's misanthropic howls are there to remind that each of the beautiful melodies at play comes from the forest's most profound levels.
This journey through icy fortresses starts its end with a convoluted interlude, before making way to the last thirty minutes. "Weiter, immer weiter" and "So hallt es wider" are brutal punchers where the violence of the wall of noise is only outweighed by how harrowing the duality of synths and guitars is. Wintherr assembles all wintery energy into one last condensed yet uncut finale, the two songs working together as one ensemble, epically concluding his longest album. What's striking is the first thought you have when finishing this two-hour listen:
I want more. On top of the riffs and the
a t m o s p h e r e created, it's the capacity to embark the listener on an enormous black metal journey that remains the record's greatest attribute. More surprisingly, the glacial and dry aesthetic works even though the temperature is bonkers high and the summer promises to be blazing and humid. It cools you down.
Im Wald also serves as a reference. As global warming deprives us of snow, one question arises: will I ever see my city draped in a white veil again? I don't know, but when I'll be missing vast icy extents, I'll have Paysage d'Hiver to help me remember what Winter truly sounds and feels like.
