COLDWORLD

Winter-themed atmospheric black metal isn't novel to ColdWorld - Paysage d'Hiver have focused on it for much longer - but Georg Börner's black metal project distinguishes itself by its depressive take on the microgenre, borrowing the morose lyrical obsessions of depressive black metal and setting them in the stark, frigid landscape of the musical offering here. Georg reveals himself to be a highly capable multi-instrumentalist, and like the best atmospheric black metal the overall presentation really sparks the imagination and conjures up vivid images of white-out snowscapes. Atmospheric black metal is a crowded little niche, but this album establishes a place for ColdWorld in the wake of predecessors such as Paysage d'Hiver and Burzum.

'Autumn' - Coldworld (74/100)

Eight years. It's insane to think I've virtually waited a third of my lifetime for a second Coldworld album. Georg Börner's first full-length with this project, Melancholie², arrived at a perfect time in my life. Perfect as in the album scratched a very specific itch; everything else at the time seemed imperfect to the point of wanting to throw it all away for good. I was listening to a ton of "pretty" atmospheric black metal at the time, but something about Coldworld stood out. It was completely bombastic and overly sentimental nearing point of ridicule, but it worked on the merit that it felt completely sincere. When depression or tragedy hit, it always feels hyperbolic. Coldworld's mesh of pure Romanticism, lo-fi black metal and light progressive touches made Melancholie² an instant favourite of mine.

It's enough to say that my excitement for a follow-up never wore out. Even if my tastes since veered toward increasingly dark and experimental music, the return of Coldworld would inevitably mark a significant full circle for myself as a listen. It took roughly eight autumns for Coldworld's own to finally arrive. By general standards, Börner has created a great atmospheric metal record. By the standards of eight years' wait and a masterpiece that preceded it, however? I love Autumn, but I feel mixed about it. Perhaps it's because the airy depressive sound is less striking in the midst of countless bands having done the same thing in the interim. Perhaps it's the less consistent emotional tone of the album. Admittedly, the relative disappointment could even be a result of the fact that I'm not the same person I was a decade ago. Autumn is a great album, but it's far from the quintessential masterwork I might have been hoping to hear.

Autumn is an eclectic bag of emotions, reeling between the depressive, uplifting, aggressive and mild. With such a wait, it makes sense that Coldworld would want to say so much in little time. Where the first album was a singularly depressive experience, Autumn means to reinvent the feelings of the listener with every track. "Scars" is a cathartic and melancholic opener-- those two words, by the way, will probably be used to death to describe this album in coming months. The blastbeats and shrieks are tempered with melodic guitar leads and gorgeous violin. "Void" stresses this contrast between dark and light even further: segments of the song are knee- deep in depressive murk, only to give way to bright post-rock airiness and airy female vocals. Whether it's from song to song or within the songs themselves, Coldworld's latest material always looks to balance the two extremes. The result, more often than not, is something beautiful that nonetheless could have gone farther with less compromise.

Even if Autumn suffers from awkward emotional flow, Coldworld once again handles both extremes brilliantly. "Womb of Emptiness" is one of the best atmospheric black metal tracks I've heard this year, rising and falling in predictable fashion but hitting all of the right marks. As a composer, his best work is found in "Autumn Shades". Even if it pales lengthwise compared to "Womb of Emptiness" before it, the classical harmonies and chord progressions tug at that nugget of perfection I know Coldworld is capable of. Even if the clean vocals run a bit thin (reminding me closely of Herbrand from Enslaved) I can feel that intimate sensation of my heart slowly breaking while I listen to it. That is Coldworld.

There is such perfection here. Unlike the debut however, it's mired with a list of less successful elements. Throughout listening to Autumn, I felt myself wondering what kind of mood Georg was in when he wrote the thing. For the debut, I could envision the man literally dredging himself out of a sea of molten depression in order to bring the music to life. Compare that to Autumn, where I'm still left unclear on what the emotional intent was supposed to be. There is light and dark, sure, and I gather that's the kind of balanced experience Coldworld means to evoke. Even so, getting dragged down into the murk only to have the music abruptly switch to pretty female vocals and nice guy post-rock feels awkward. Or consider how serene the violins are on "The Wind and the Leaves", only to cut out of the mix and make way for hateful riffs and dread via "Climax of Sorrow". Where is the intuitive flow? There have been times listening to this album I've felt convinced Georg Börner wasn't inspired by these extreme feelings writing Autumn, but rather the memory of having felt them at one point.

I guess it's easy to feel jaded when someone's waited for an album for so long. It would take a master argument to put this in the same aisle as Melancholie², but Coldworld has a brighter future ahead of them than the dark depths of its music sometimes imply. If Autumn fails to create an overarching emotional journey like its predecessor, I can at least love it on the grounds that it's a fantastic collection of atmospheric black metal pieces. I can only hope that we hear another album like this from Coldworld without having to wait so many seasons.

Originally written for Heathen Harvest Periodical

'Melancholie' - Coldworld (96/100)

I'll get my grand declarations out of the way first. Melancholie² is probably the prettiest black metal album ever made. If not that, it' at least the prettiest one I've heard. I came across the work of Georg Börner and his project ColdWorld around the time this debut came out in 2008. I'd been searching for new depressive black metal to match a fittingly tenuous stage in my life. "My Dead Bride" was the first ColdWorld song I ever heard, and I can think of few times where a band's been able to leave such an impression on me with less than three minutes of music.

Having been listening to this album for almost a decade now, I can understand the detractors' criticisms of Melancholie². It's admittedly hyperbolic in its sentimentality, and despite its lo-fi fuzz there's an all-too clean sense of refinement in the way the material is executed. But with all that said, recognizing these would-be gripes in the years since hasn't stopped me from seeing it as a near-perfect work of art. Whenever I listen to it, ColdWorld takes me to a very specific place emotionally. I am leagues more embittered when it comes to black metal than I ever was back in 2008, but, like a trusted friend you fall in and out of contact with over the years, there is a warm comfort in hearing Melancholie². It's an album I feel like I've grown with to the point of extreme familiarity. Ironically, that fact makes the album extremely difficult to review.

Brushing aside my personal biases towards Melancholie² for a moment, let's cover the basics. Coldworld had released a promising demo and solid EP before this, but there wasn't special reason to believe that ColdWorld would be coming out with a masterpiece, come the debut. Despite an admittedly silly name ("Melancholy squared? Melancholy to the power of two? Square multiplication ist krieg?") there are precious few atmospheric black metal bands that seem to tap into some well of perfection. Whether you love or shrug off ColdWorld, "perfection" is hopefully a word we can all agree on, although we may take the term for different meanings. A seemingly raw, lo-fi blanket covers the sound-- the likes of which you've heard in a thousand other one-man BM projects. On Melancholie² however, listening to it the album intently enough, it doesn't have that cloudy murk of usual raw black metal. Hell, it doesn't even feel raw to me. It's as lo-fi as anything else, to be sure, but it sounds like Georg Börner has gone the extra mile towards taking all aspects of the sound under his control.

Some will interpret this move as a mark of dryness. That could not be further from the truth. Putting tight wraps on the sound design would be a call to boredom in lesser hands, but ColdWorld emerged on the scene already under the spell of a master. Burzum is the obvious frontrunner of the atmospheric end of black metal, and off the top of my head, I can't think of anyone who rivalled Vikernes in terms of vision and lo-fi magic like this guy. That sounds like lavish praise to be giving to a project with a single album out, and it is, but the warmth isn't without good reason. ColdWorld stands out in virtually every way, in a genre that is notorious for sameness and throwaway acts. If Georg found a perfection in the execution, he mirrored it with his compositions. There's no subtlety in the music's emotional pull, but there doesn't need to be. ColdWorld's bleeding, melodic heart echoes the very best composers from the Romantic-era, where complexity was streamlined in favour of feeling. "Dream of a Dead Sun", "Red Snow" and "My Dead Bride" are meticulously structured and performed, but the resulting atmosphere gives the music all the life it could ever need.

ColdWorld succeeds as a DSBM record, bringing melodies and songwriting tact into a style they're sometimes absent from. "Tortured by Solitude" is one of those atmospheric black metal tracks that feels instantly familiar the first time you hear it, with overwhelming, tragic feelings belying the calculated approach. The archetypal depressive "woe is me" mentality comes through most noticeably on "My Dead Bride" and "Red Snow", but there are parts here that nearly sound cheerful by comparison. If there are any gripes of my own I can spot with Melancholie², it's the cheery break at the end of "Hymn to Eternal Frost". I get that ColdWorld is not a depressive act in the conventional sense, but a build-up that sounds like it's part of some lifeloving gazer band. Coldworld is at its best when the music surrenders to the negativity, trying to find catharsis through it rather than negation.

The pristine exploration of ambient ColdWorld shows on "Winterreise" is another mark of proof that the project can (and should) be compared on favourable grounds with Burzum. Almost everything Melancholie² touches turns to a pristine gold. And if I'm more jaded about it now that I used to be, I still love it as much as I ever have. There are so, so many of these one-man acts that try to do what ColdWorld do, but I don't know of any that come so close to the mark, and especially not on their first try. If I were to guess, I'd say the perfection stems from the fact that Georg Börner is all too happy to be making music the way he wants to, uncompromiing in the face of what people might be searching for in black metal. Turn up all the emotions to 11? Why not. Throw a theremin and electronic beats onto your closer "Escape" and casually push the definition of genre itself? Absolutely. The things that make Coldworld distinct from the rest could be loved or hated dependent on what you're searching for. I know where I stand, at least. An album I've been putting on on-and-off for a significant percentage of my life has got to have something going for it.

"TheStarsAreDeadNow" was originally a demo release by German atmospheric/post black metal act ColdWorld. The demo was initially released in January 2006 in a limited 50 Pro-CDRs version but was re-released (again limited to 50 copies) in March 2006 with two bonus tracks. "TheStarsAreDeadNow" was released as a vinyl EP in May 2008 limited to 287 copies (100 on white vinyl). It has since seen a couple of more reissues. ColdWorld is a one-man project and G.B. plays all instruments and sings on the EP.

The music on the EP is melancholic and atmospheric post black metal with some really majestic moments along the way. The vocals are harsh black metal rasps. The pace varies from blasting to more mid-tempo parts. With titles like "Hate", "Cancer", and "Suicide" it´s not hard to imagine the lyrical universe on "TheStarsAreDeadNow" and the music definitely follows suit. While the music is at times pretty harsh there´s a melancholic beauty in the tracks that makes the music stand out from other acts with a similar sound. G.B. is excellent at creating melancholy and an atmosphere of despair in his music.

"TheStarsAreDeadNow" is a very promising first release by ColdWorld and considering that this was originally a demo the sound quality (while being somewhat lo-fi) has turned out alright. A 3 star (60%) rating is warranted.