Reviewed - 03/10/05
Cold
Inside
[Behemoth Productions]
Ahhhh... Man, do I ever love the Winter season! The ice, the snow, the cold, the not having tourists everywhere. I live for this season. There's just something about it I've always liked ever since I was a kid. I feel pretty lucky to live in a place where it snows from October to May, but I;m never fucking happy and I always wish that it could be eternal Winter. But it can't be that way, so the next best thing may be to listen to the newest album from the German black metal band Wolfthorn entitled "Cold Inside". An excellent album to throw on when it's midsummer and too hot outside.
The music on "Cold Inside" is just that - cold! Icy, raw and grim black metal played with so much hatred that after the C.D. stops spinning you'll see a layer of frost on your speakers. No kidding, this is some uncaring, foreboding and hate-filled black metal here, my friends. I usually despise this kind of music what with the drum machine and fuzzy high-pitched guitar sound and all, but like I've said numerous times before, I can forgive these things as long as the music sounds like actual music and not an attempt to be fast just for the sake of being fast. Wolfthorn manages to throw in some rather catchy melodies here and there, so it gets points for that in my book. Sure, it's cold, furious and fast, but it's pleasing to the ear as well. "Cold Inside" really reminds me a lot of Darkthrone's "Transylvanian Hunger", but with more melody. And considering this is a one man band, that makes it all the more respectable.
The lyrics are written in and sung in English and focus almost entirely on the destruction of mankind and what Earth would be like if there were no humans left. Also, there's a lot of references to extreme cold temperatures. Sweet. Lone member Thurlokh has a pretty standard raw BM vocal style, but it gets the job done. Again the vocals remind me a bit of Darkthrone, but Thurlokh's voice is an octave or two higher in pitch. It's a vocal style black metal fans will love, but it definitely won't bring any new fans into the genre.
The production on this album is weird. I've never heard anything quite like it. The guitar parts are really tinny and fuzzy at the same time, and yet the bass drums from the drum machine are nice and bassy sounding. Almost every tinny sounding album I've heard also had either high pitched bass drums or the drums were extremely muffled sounding. This production seems to make the tinniness and the bassiness cancel each other out and live in harmony somehow. Anyway, for a drum machine, it sounds pretty damn good. The last three songs on this album are taken from an earlier demo, and these tracks have a terrible production all around. But I guess that can be expected of about any demo material.
The packaging and layout of the album I have a love/hate relationship with. The cover art shows some huge church or cemetery mausoleum in the midst of a freezing snowstorm. This is pretty cool, but the inside of the lyric booklet is another matter. For some reason, even though there are ten songs on the album, only three of the song's lyrics were printed inside. The booklet is only a two page deal and they may have decided to only print the lyrics for three songs to save money, but they could have just used a smaller font size instead and they could have put all of the lyrics in there. Oh well, I've seen this same thing on other albums before and it's nothing to get worked up over.
As you can see, I gave this album an "8/10" rating. That's almost unheard of from me because I usually don't care for these type of low-fi styled raw black metal bands. That means that if I gave it this high of a score, fans of this genre will probably love it. I have to compliment Thurlokh on "Cold Inside" as it is a grand piece of work coming from just one man. Hopefully on the next album the production value will go up, but if not I'd be happy if he just manages to keep the melody there.
[Behemoth Productions]
Ahhhh... Man, do I ever love the Winter season! The ice, the snow, the cold, the not having tourists everywhere. I live for this season. There's just something about it I've always liked ever since I was a kid. I feel pretty lucky to live in a place where it snows from October to May, but I;m never fucking happy and I always wish that it could be eternal Winter. But it can't be that way, so the next best thing may be to listen to the newest album from the German black metal band Wolfthorn entitled "Cold Inside". An excellent album to throw on when it's midsummer and too hot outside.
The music on "Cold Inside" is just that - cold! Icy, raw and grim black metal played with so much hatred that after the C.D. stops spinning you'll see a layer of frost on your speakers. No kidding, this is some uncaring, foreboding and hate-filled black metal here, my friends. I usually despise this kind of music what with the drum machine and fuzzy high-pitched guitar sound and all, but like I've said numerous times before, I can forgive these things as long as the music sounds like actual music and not an attempt to be fast just for the sake of being fast. Wolfthorn manages to throw in some rather catchy melodies here and there, so it gets points for that in my book. Sure, it's cold, furious and fast, but it's pleasing to the ear as well. "Cold Inside" really reminds me a lot of Darkthrone's "Transylvanian Hunger", but with more melody. And considering this is a one man band, that makes it all the more respectable.
The lyrics are written in and sung in English and focus almost entirely on the destruction of mankind and what Earth would be like if there were no humans left. Also, there's a lot of references to extreme cold temperatures. Sweet. Lone member Thurlokh has a pretty standard raw BM vocal style, but it gets the job done. Again the vocals remind me a bit of Darkthrone, but Thurlokh's voice is an octave or two higher in pitch. It's a vocal style black metal fans will love, but it definitely won't bring any new fans into the genre.
The production on this album is weird. I've never heard anything quite like it. The guitar parts are really tinny and fuzzy at the same time, and yet the bass drums from the drum machine are nice and bassy sounding. Almost every tinny sounding album I've heard also had either high pitched bass drums or the drums were extremely muffled sounding. This production seems to make the tinniness and the bassiness cancel each other out and live in harmony somehow. Anyway, for a drum machine, it sounds pretty damn good. The last three songs on this album are taken from an earlier demo, and these tracks have a terrible production all around. But I guess that can be expected of about any demo material.
The packaging and layout of the album I have a love/hate relationship with. The cover art shows some huge church or cemetery mausoleum in the midst of a freezing snowstorm. This is pretty cool, but the inside of the lyric booklet is another matter. For some reason, even though there are ten songs on the album, only three of the song's lyrics were printed inside. The booklet is only a two page deal and they may have decided to only print the lyrics for three songs to save money, but they could have just used a smaller font size instead and they could have put all of the lyrics in there. Oh well, I've seen this same thing on other albums before and it's nothing to get worked up over.
As you can see, I gave this album an "8/10" rating. That's almost unheard of from me because I usually don't care for these type of low-fi styled raw black metal bands. That means that if I gave it this high of a score, fans of this genre will probably love it. I have to compliment Thurlokh on "Cold Inside" as it is a grand piece of work coming from just one man. Hopefully on the next album the production value will go up, but if not I'd be happy if he just manages to keep the melody there.
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Tracklist:
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| Rating: 8/10 | |
| Release Date: 2005 | |
| Length: 42:17 | |
| Review By: Britton Dicks | |
| Total Reviews: (1) | |
| Bands Website: Go Here | |
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