2/01/2014

A Winter Lost - Die längste Nacht (2013)

Picking up the pieces where a band by the name of, Ashes of Christ, came to smithereens, A Winter Lost, arose out of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada in '05, although it wasn't until late '10 that the bands debut recording, Weltenende, saw release.

A few more years down the road and this 3-piece continues onwards with, Die längste Nacht, once again through, Sun & Moon Records. Interestingly, in spite of their Canadian home base, A Winter Lost, writes most of their lyrics in German, and none of the members are even of German descent, although all of them have studied the language.

A Winter Lost plays a sort of raw and cold sounding black metal that doesn't necessarily bring a certain band to mind, but sounds familiar either way. With the music moving between faster galloping paces to slower dirge like moods, they manage to capture the right atmosphere, which is mostly that of a depressive, icy and tormented style the whole way through. Frigid tremolo riffs characterize the album, with smidgens of underlining melody, while the drums are pushed way back in the production, and the lead vocals manifest as a sort of shrieking reptilian howl. There's definitely no bass guitar present.

What get's me about this album is that there's something going on, there's even a minor sense of catchiness in the riffing at times, but the band is just not taking it to the next level. Yes, the songs simply have a habit of sounding entirely too much alike, which seems to be the general complaint of their earlier work, too.

On the other hand, Zeichen's, ending has a choral part intermingled with acoustics, similarly, Speergesang, has another female choral part pushed behind the raging chaos, and the title track has a soft acoustic break with cleanly sung vocals, but these songs are at the end of the album. Why not the start? Sometimes saving the best for last is not the right path.

At twelve songs and almost forty seven minutes of music, Die längste Nacht, feels like a big mouthful, but listen to about half of the recording or songs randomly and it seems to fit, more so. Unfortunately, most people buy an album with the intentions of playing it from start to finish, and in less you really, really dig the style on display you might find this one to be a challenge to get through.

Nevertheless, not all is lost, as I feel these guys and one girl have the right intentions in mind, but now they just need to either write some seriously bad ass riffs with cleverer song structures or continue to diversify their tunes.

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