Their penchant for mammoth sized and funeral-paced, wasteland droning has become a touchstone reference for bands across the whole spectrum of underground metal. Perpetually out of print, much sought after and universally worshipped amongst those in the know, Winter’s Into Darkness was a game-changing classic.įormed in New York circa 1988, Winter played slow, deep and hard nuclear doom with a crust punk rawness, that came across like Hellhammer jamming with Amebix. This version is on clear vinyl and limited to 400 copies.
#INTO DARKNESS INTO DARKNESS ALBUM BY WINTER PLUS#
Muse with me in the comments section.The ultimate edition on vinyl! Housed in a heavy-duty slipcase, the package features a replica of Into Darkness LP with original cover layout, the demo Eternal Frost making its vinyl debut plus a thick magazine with Winter memorabilia. Well, I didn’t intend Revisiting the Classics necessarily to be a review series, just nostalgic musing on albums past that defined this genre we so love. I know you’re thinking “this isn’t really a review”. All the way through, these 7 songs are pure pitch-black, asphyxiating, death-metal-soaked doom. The bass of John Alman is obese and sludgy, while his vocals, with their death metal flare, are the sound of a stoic swamp beast musing to itself. The drums of Joe Goncalves pound with a thunder that signals your coming end, serving less to beat your face in and more to play your life out to its end through tribal-sounding timbre. The guitar tone of Stephen Flam is fuzzy and thick, both encapsulating and producing a feeling of disorientation.
It seriously sounds like the audio equivalent of a filthy, death-shrouded torture chamber, with some bodily decomposition thrown in for good measure. I realize I’m becoming repetitive, but “dank” really is the defining word for this album. When the album hits its first track with vocals, “Servants Of The Warsmen”, the mood has been set.
This goes on for nearly 6 minutes, with eerie quiet synths growing slightly louder as the track progresses. “Oppression Freedom/Reprise” starts this album on an appropriate note, with muddy, thick-ass, distorted guitars droning an ominous progression. Tuning their instruments down to A for fucking abysmal was something that had to have sounded nuts back then, at least in the States, though we know that even by this time, Swedish bands were tuning their instruments down to the same or similar keys. Winter were only a three piece, a small band for the time and still small by modern convention, but the three of them produced such unheard of sounds that the music must have come as a shock in contrast to the rest of what was going on in 1990. Into Darkness is so dank, so dark, so putrid and vile you can literally feel and imagine yourself walking through sewage and corpses as you listen to it. But for those who are interested, you can get Into Darkness from Southern Lord Records on its own without the EP.
Despite being a whole new batch of material, the EP feels perfectly at home on the same disc with Into Darkness. Winter’s Into Darkness can be purchased on disk along with an EP called Eternal Frost that was released in 1994. What I am revisiting today is the original version of the album. These guys virtually created the deathdoom style, and on the basis of their only full-length album, they still qualify as the heaviest, most morbid, and most brutal band in the entire sub-genre AND THIS ALBUM IS 21 YEARS OLD NOW! Winter are a band who have remained unfairly underrated and unrecognized in the metal landscape. ( TheMadIsraeli contributes another look-back at a classic album of metal.)
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