Does this album feel as cold as – 273,15°? Well, not completely, but it definitely feels like the musical equivalent of a merciless snowstorm. It’s just not a perfect storm.
This is an album that mainly tries to immerse you in a cold and harsh atmosphere, and sometimes that works, sometimes not so much. There’s a lot of great harshness, in the heavy riffs and drums, and the screaming vocals. The riffs often sound like these type of black metal riffs that try to imitate the sound of the wind blowing, or sometimes, they have this dark and eerie tone. That kind of atmosphere created by the riffs works pretty well, especially in first track Trauerweide’s haunting main riff. While the music is pretty heavy overall, it also has some moments of melancholy and eerie quietness, like in the middle and the end of A Hole in my Heart.
The vocals are black metal shrieks, and sometimes more, well, human-sounding screams, with a few haunting spoken parts here and there. In tracks like A Hole in My Heart or A Moment of Violence, the lead vocalist receives some dialogue and some backing vocals from her bandmates. As their vocals sound pretty different, this creates a fun contrast. But the vocals are also one of the weaknesses of this record. I usually don’t find black metal shrieks annoying, but they have to be done right. If black metal-type vocalists don’t sound good doing high-pitched vocals, they sound shrill and annoying, and this is an example of that. I’ll admit it kind of ruins my enjoyment of the album.
Other things that take me out of the immersion experience are the album’s other small flaws. The songs are pretty long, and they unfortunately sound kind of the same. That combined to the shrill vocals can make them hard to get through, I must say. There are not a lot of interesting ideas in those songs. The band doesn’t do that much with their harsh riff and cold atmosphere formula. As a proof of that, the title track is an instrumental outro that basically plays the same weird sounds for a few minutes.
That said, there still are some good things on that album, like the riff on Trauerweide, the dialogue between the two vocalists, the really heavy ending of A Moment of Violence, and the melancholy of A Hole in my Heart, a track that best exemplifies this depressive black metal style that the band is going for. It’s not a bad album, but not a great one either. I guess it can be used for an immersion in a cold and dark atmosphere, but it’s not the best album you could use for that purpose.
Release date: April 7th, 2020
If you really would like to support Antichrist, you can just Share our article.
You can also support Antichrist by sending a couple bucks to cover some webhosting expenses. =>> PayPal
