Style: Exceedingly raw black metal and ambient
Primary Emotions/Themes: The bleakness of winter, solitude, hopelessness
Thoughts: One of the defining traits of black metal is how raw some of it can be. How hard is it to listen to? I find that many black metal bands will intentionally mutilate the production of their music to the point where it's almost indiscernible what is going on.
Sometimes this works well and adds an intangible aspect to the music that would be lost with better production. Other times the music itself is completely lost in the noise. As for Paysage d'Hiver on Kerker it feels like it's somewhere in between.
The first time I put this record on I wasn't sure if the song had even started. Tiefe starts out so soft and so noise ridden that it's hard to hear the music at all. Eventually I figured out that the fuzz I was hearing was actually guitars, and the low pulse was drums.
I'll be honest here, this one lost me on the first few listens. I could tell that there was something buried deep in the craziness, but what that was I couldn't wrap my head around. When I tried to listen intently I got a headache, and when I gave up that approach I just heard noise. I was disappointed that I couldn't make sense of it, especially since I've been listening to black metal over half of my life.
I came back to the record after some time and somehow things were different. Instead of fuzz I heard riffs, instead of noise I heard vocals, the drums started distinguishing themselves from the noise as well. The ambient tracks started revealing the hidden layers under the rhythmic pulses. It started to click.
Even now after quite some time of the album having made its way into my brain, I'm not sure if I like it or not. I do know that Wintherr has released much better demos than this one, and I am looking forward to revisiting those as well. For the time being though Kerker is a fine album that will get revisited again in short order to answer the age old question: do I actually enjoy this or am I fooling myself?
Written March 3rd 2024
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