Winter Landscape

What is this? When I downloaded this demo from Jamendo, I expected not much of it, but from second one the band was able to catch my attention. Why? Well, this is fast and aggressive black metal of a slightly different sort. Some weird noise, ambient and industrial parts had been woven into the music and a done to death approach is able to create some amount of fascination. Yes, nothing new here; nothing new at all. But guess what, Silem got their shit together and progress in terms of a music in a region I have some fascination for: black metal meets noise.

Black Abyss My Spirit would be the opener of Winter Landscapes and while other artists would associate something bleak and desolate with such a metaphor, this band fires barrage after barrage. Just listen at the first second of this track. Would you really expect such? Organs meet white noise and this combination progresses later into some Setherial – Hell Eternal – or Dark Funeral influenced music. Fast, aggressive, characteristic guitar leads – see: Vobiscum Satanas – can be found throughout the entire demo and would these be the sole facets of this release, then you could pretty much ignore it. No, the horse is dead, so please try to suppress your necromantic feelings.

Some words should be spent on the non-metal parts. Unlike in the releases of Rotorvator or Demetrius Grave, on Silem’s debut these were not neatly woven into the concept, but rather appear a bit randomly and surprisingly outside of what a normal listener would expect. You can find these at the beginning, maybe somewhere in between and certainly towards the end. Yet, to describe the way they had been added as convincing would be a bit far from the truth. The listener might long for some sort of a red line … but as this is the first demo, such flaw might be expected.

This is a good and interesting output. Even though the idea of combining black metal with influences from other genres is not new and also not executed in an entirely convincing way, the performance is still as such as to motivate the listener to take some additional spins. A bit more experimenting, a bit more daring in the approach and the music could become interesting indeed.

Based on a review originally written for ‘A dead spot of light (Number 5)’:
http://www.archive.org/details/ADeadSpotOfLight...number5