Metal: Phantom Winter: The Metal Niche

Metal that doesn’t fit in at folk festivals like Wacken, but also doesn’t want to be linked to avant-garde discourses – it can still be found every now and then, and then it usually makes a huge noise. There aren’t that many bands who don’t want to produce something theatrical or cliché, but also don’t want to produce conceptually or technically advanced avant rock. Today is the Day, for example, has been in this niche for decades, as have Napalm Death and Godflesh. Phantom Winter from Würzburg, which emerged from the instrumental band Omega Massif, which dissolved in 2014, travels the same region. What all of the bands mentioned have in common: irony and pathos have come to an end, instead it’s about cracks and breaks. In all seriousness.

Everything then oozes out through the cracks: anger, despair, rejection of the world. The habitus is lively and destructive, the gestures extremely sullen. “Her Cold Materials”, Phantom Winter’s fourth album, sounds correspondingly burdened. The band suggested the word “Winterdoom” as a category for their music, which fits. The first piece, for example, “Flamethrowers”. It begins with the sounds of death knells and rolling guitars, everything tense, as if someone were pressing the accelerator and the brake at the same time. Two singers, one screams, the other makes low voices, everything sounds like winter cold and fear, but always beautifully destructive.

“Her Cold Materials” already seems unique in the genre with its negativity and bad-tempered seriousness. But this music is also very unique in other respects. The album tells a, quote from the press release, “coming-of-age folk horror tale” about an unhappy teenager who seems to get angrier with each piece. Like its predecessor “Into Dark Science”, “Her Cold Materials” develops something like feminist-informed metal.

There are always moments on deadly serious metal and noise albums in which the music takes on something maelstrom-like and simultaneously weighs you down and throws you into the air. To stay with the first example: Shortly before “Flamethrowers” reaches the six-minute mark, the piece picks up, after a very quiet prelude in which everyone starts up, only to take off a little later: tinkling bells, noise, voices crashing . One of many moments in which disgust for the world turns into liberation. Depression and the impulse to kick through the wall are very close together in Phantom Winter’s music.

Phantom Winter: Her Cold Materials

(This Charming Man/Cargo)

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