WINTERHORDE — Maestro (review)

WINTERHORDE — Maestro album cover Album · 2016 · Melodic Black Metal Buy this album from MMA partners
5/5 ·
666sharon666
Likely owing to the amount of line-up changes they've had since the release of their second album Underwatermoon in 2010, Israeli progressive black metal act Winterhorde have certainly made their fans wait for the release of their third album. Entitled Maestro, it was finally released in 2016. It's been out a while now, and it's been clear to me for some time that the wait was definitely worth it, as I love this album. But the more I listen to it I can't help wonder if this won't end up, in hindsight, feeling like a transitional album for the band.

This is still a black metal album, melodic/symphonic black metal specifically, but it sounds to me like Winterhorde are taking steps toward leaving black metal behind in comparison to Underwatermoon. The changing sound of the band is even more evident if you listen to their first album Nebula and Maestro back to back and skip Underwatermoon. This album may bring back Nebula's vocalist Zed “Z. Winter” Destructive to the fold after being replaced by Horeph for Underwatermoon (Horeph still guests on Maestro's title track though) but they've also decided to bring in a second vocalist, Igor "Khazar" Kungurow, to sing clean vocals, probably because Horeph used both cleans and growls, which makes it a very different release to Nebula. While Zed certainly doesn't hold back from using his growls on any of the songs here and the vocals are more or less evenly shared (with a few guests showing up here and there), the album does feel as if it's Zed supporting Igor, who shows himself the surprise star of the album. In extreme metal artists mixing growls and cleans isn't unheard of but the clean singing usually plays second fiddle to the growling and that's not my impression of this album. That the music is also very polished for black metal only furthers my belief that in time, perhaps even on their next album, they'll have left black metal behind and fully embraced a progressive metal sound.

Of course I might be completely wrong about that, but I can only write about my own experience with the album and to be based on how this sounds it seems likely. But whether I'm right or wrong the one thing I'm definitely sure if is that Winterhorde is a class act who've produced another excellent release. It's excellent from start to finish, but the key tracks for me are Worms of Soul, where the band add the distinctive sound of a theremin to their music, the 11:30 long epic The Heart of Coryphee and the brilliant closing track Dancing in Flames.
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