Paysage d'Hiver - Das Tor, or, How Many Times Can Tobias Möckl Release An Album With Faintly Amateurish Folk-Art Of Snow And Trees On Its Cover Before Somebody Tells Him To Knock It The Fuck Off?A lot, because this album kicks ass. It's probably his best work ever: even
Die Festung was nothing Tangerine Dream circa
Phaedra couldn't have done, and too much of his other work is bland and overlong. This album is also kind of overlong - 80 minutes on the nose actually - but bland is NOT how I would describe it. in fact I am kind of struggling to describe it in a more general sense: as always with Möckl the milieu in which we are working is long-winded, ambitious, and (though it semi-ironically pains me to use the term)
atmospheric black metal. But the reason why Paysage d'Hiver is interesting in a broader sense is because it's always been about synthesizing the fuzzed-out metallic and synth/ambient influences from Burzum etc. into a common music (hell, this album's thematically indistinguishable from
Hvis lyset tar oss anyway): but here more than ever, drone and ambient influences boss the composition even as the tone remains firmly in screeching vocals and yowling distorted guitars. It's strongly reminiscent of some of the weirder work of American atmospheric black metal acts (Fell Voices come to mind) which makes this a pretty cool ouroboros of scene history, since Paysage d'Hiver's late-90s rise to subcultural prominence (together to some extent with the roughly contemporaneous rise of Summoning, and definitely together with early Blut Aus Nord and Ulver before they got all shite and all artsy respectively): I repeat, it is very like an ouroboros since Paysage d'Hiver's late-90s rise to subcultural prominence was part of what spurred on the beginnings of the modern wave of Murrican black metalists with Xasthur and Leviathan. And the rest is history (or maybe "history" would be a better way of saying it, since nobody actually cares).
After all that it's a little disappointing to me that I still don't really have a whole lot to say about the album specifically other than that it's good. It is good, and good in a way that lends itself easily to favorable comparison: I had to hold myself back from irrelevantly decrying Branikald, Velvet Cacoon, and Urfaust by analogy - all three of whom (which? seems ungrammatical either way) I enjoy listening to. I could apply any number of adjectives to this album too: you bet my ass I excised at least three occurrences of the word "psychedelic" from this review before I posted it. Anyway I dance around saying anything of descriptive value here not primarily so that I can showcase my erudition in the field of study that is historical development of lo-fi nerd music (although I also have lots of fun doing that) but more because the music itself is remarkably overwhelming stuff. I mean, each side opens and closes with the obligatory minute or two of moaning winter winds and footsteps through snow but in between those two you're in for half an hour of pretty elaborate black metal at a time and most of that time is not spent riffing but being loud and, well, atmospheric. Does it work? It does, well. It's one of the better black metal albums I have heard in recent years: mächtiger, as he puts it, als ich jemals gedacht. And if you like black metal you should listen to it yesterday.
Bomby von Bombsville wrote:There is a Los Angeles hip hop collective called "Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All." It includes some names such as Earl Sweatshirt, Mike G, Domo Genesis, Left Brain, Hodgy Beats, Frank Ocean, and Tyler, the Creator, among like 9000 other people. I like to add random words/letters to their name/acronym because it's kind of a silly name/acronym. I mean, how on earth do you pronounce "OFWGKTA?"
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