Paysage d'Hiver – Das Tor

February 22, 2013 • Kunsthall Produktionen

I've never really been into Paysage d'Hiver and I don't think I've heard anything out of his considerable catalog (aside from sister band Darkspace) but this album has been making some waves lately, so I figured I'd give it a shot. Perhaps I wasn't prepared for the brutality to come, but it's a pretty intense album, the kind that engulfs the listener in freezing misery and noise. And that's a good thing.

This album takes the concept of "atmospheric black metal" and turns up the dials on both "atmospheric" and "black metal". It's one hell of a raw album. The music itself is absolutely furious, with unrelenting blastbeats, razor-sharp tremolo guitars, and some of the most anguished and wretched vocals I've heard in a long time. The production wraps everything into a thick, almost impenetrable wall of sound as the distortion on the guitar takes up most of the sonic headroom, with a little left over for the occasional synth strings in the background. It's a bit lo-fi, but not quite in the same way many early black metal recordings are lo-fi as the production isn't bad, just a bit hazy. And it's a hell of a loud album, too; some of the more intense parts actually made my ears hurt a bit (though that might be due to compression artifacts; hard to say).

The metal parts are bookended by long stretches of field recordings of howling winds—fitting to the aesthetic, I suppose, but can you say "cliché"? And the concept gets old really fast, especially when it's several minutes of what might as well be the same sample between every track.

As nice as the aesthetics are, though, I am having a hard time really getting into Das Tor. The songwriting isn't terribly interesting—not helped by the fact that the riffs are often really difficult to make out over all the fuzz—and there isn't a lot of variation to what's going on. Sure, it's supposed to be atmospheric, I get that it's one of those albums that is meant to be put on and kind of sit in the background. The mood is what's important. So it definitely has that going for it; I don't mind putting it on and focusing on something else. But focusing on the four huge fifteen-minutes-plus tracks is a tough job.

That said, I suppose the album succeeds at what it set out to do, and it's been growing on me as I've listened. A solid black metal album, but one that probably won't be for anyone. Bring a heavy coat; it's gonna be cold.

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