The Cult of Flesh

From the slew of lesser known and underground black metal bands comes Pagan Winter. Pagan Winter is a band that certainly does nothing original but manages to produce a sound that can have many different types of audio enjoyment extracted from it. The overall sound this band produces is a raw and relentless black metal. This album, or EP (it clocks in at just over 21 minutes), is made to be listened to all at once all the way through from first track to last. , excluding the last track, the Darkthrone cover Under A Funeral Moon.

The Cult Of Flesh musically sounds like a raw, not well produced, and talented black metal band. The band can play all their instruments very well. The riffs can be raw and also well played. The intro song Lord Of Decay showcases a brutal start with a relentless raw riff that doesn't stop for well over a minute. The guitar is shredded and raw, which goes along great with the gargled moans the song begins with. If the entire album were like this it would be a total bore and would be worth listening to no more than two times, such is not the case. On Guardians of Darkness the intro riff is raw, heavy, and slow moving riff, much like the intro to Lord Of Decay, but after the intro riff the guitars change to a galloping rhythm that you would find on better produced black metal albums. It still retains the raw feel of the album, but it adds a faster pace to the song along with some more intensity and complexity. The guitar work overall ranges from mediocre to good, at times quite enjoyable.

The two rawest elements of this album are the vocals and drums. No where on this album will you find the blast beats and of Marduk or the Heavy drums of Carpathian Forest. The drums are fast yet retain a distant feel to them. While they work very well with the music, helping keep the fast and relentless pace of the songs, they always sound distant and pure. Nothing is used to make them sound louder than their presence. Normally this would be very boring or unnoticeable, but for an album such as this it works very well to help it have a very raw feel. Adding to the raw feel equally is the always gargled vocals. The vocals on this album don't sounds like the desperate or hate filled screams of many other black metal bands, but have a gargled, drowning, fleeting sound to them. The lyrics are delivered fast and in short spurts which work well with the gargled vocals. For if the singer attempted to prolong his lyrics and singing it would become boring and slow as the vocal style by itself is nothing special. This gargled singing works well with the ultra raw and fast paced relentless feel this album has.

This album does have a flaw to it that make its replay value low. Every track is good, but every track is the same. No two tracks make an effort to distinguish themselves from each other. The albums short length does not help this problem either. When each song on an album is just a reused formula of the last with nothing different or interesting to offer from the last its easy to lose track of where you are on the album. For an album this short it's a serious problem, after the first track is over and the second starts it's just more of the same causing the listening to lose interest or drift in and out of the music just to occasionally catch some musically interesting or enjoyable, like the riffs or drumming I mentioned. But even these elements are not enough to keep the listener into the album. Hence as soon as The Cult Of Flesh Starts you feel that it ends. Nothing this album does generates constant enjoyment. Overall not a bad album, but it lacks anything that can make a black metal fan keep his or her attention on it. Only check this band and album out if you are a huge raw black metal fan, because that's what this album is, a well played raw bore.