COLDWORLD — Melancholie² (review)

Album · 2008 · Atmospheric Black Metal

4.5/5 · 2012-01-12
Wilytank

Winter themed atmospheric black metal mixed with depressive black metal was an inevitable concoction, but I am very impressed with the way G.B. pulled it off on 'Melancholie²'. It captures wintery essences very well: bleak and beautiful at the same time. The artwork even goes along with it quite nicely as well. The music does remind me of snow falling hard enough (but not windy/blizzard-like) to obscure the background in a haze of white. It is through this haze of white that the journey through this album took me.

The first four songs seem to represent the snowfall during the daytime while the rest seem to represent the nighttime using the lower key. The process of transitioning through the two types of scenic sounds is quite intriguing. All of the music is slow to mid-paced with a good amount of tempo transitions to be found including some slower blastbeating (definitely faster but not blizzard-like like Paysage d'Hiver). There's also "Tortured by Solitude" which is mostly mid-paced, and two ambient pieces "Winterreise", falling into the daytime category; and "Stille", falling into the nighttime category.

Throughout this album, there's plenty of atmosphere to be found. The slow, melodic black metal music is almost always accompanied with a background keyboard; and, obviously, it sounds cold and sorrowful. I do like the inclusion of a violin/viola/whatever in "Tortured by Solitude" and "Hymn to Eternal Frost"; the former is a designated (by me) "daytime song" and the latter is a "nighttime song", so you get to experience both ends of the spectrum.

What other little tricks are used in the album? The bleak, mood setting intro to "Dream of a Dead Sun"; sweet sounding calm guitar segments in "Dream of a Dead Sun", the end of "Red Snow" continued into "Stille", and in "Hymn to Eternal Frost"; the clean background vocals in "Dream of a Dead Sun"; the semi-choral sounding "ahh"s at the end of "Hymn to Eternal Frost" and in the background at the end of "My Dead Bride"; and "Escape", probably the most experimental piece on the album. "Escape" is really a weird mixture. There's the calm sounding guitar notes and keyboard ambiance, sure, but there's also some electronic style drum track going on in the background for the first part of the song. Another part of the song puts the raw sounding black metal instruments and less electronic sounding drum playing into the mixture along with more prominent sounding keyboard notes and eventually the violin as well. "Escape" is the only song on the album that doesn't seem to fit into either the "daytime" or "nighttime" sides that I establish; it's a dimension all it's own, and for that it was the best song to end the album with.

So that's another winter album for everyone to enjoy. The depressive flavor seems like an obvious variation, but for some reason, ColdWorld is one of the few bands that can actually make it sound great.