Album Review: Tine - A Winter Horrorscape
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
Ah, the one man band. There’s a few ways in which I blow hot and cold on the state of music in 2025; on the one hand, it’s possibly never been more difficult to draw reasonable recompense from music alone. On the flipside, the availability of recording software has allowed creative types everywhere boundless opportunities to indulge their musical passions. At best, we get piercing, undiluted glances into singular artistic visions, works of genius as capable of shifting the musical landscape just as tidily as any of thepathfinding artists before them. At it worst… dear god, but I’ve heard a lot of shitty black metal over the years, panda-faced teenagers taking grainy selfies in a closet before banging out tinny Darkthrone plagiarism with the treble turned up to bat migraine levels and drum samples ranging from smacking handcuffs off a pan and attacking a carpet with a slipper for a kick drum. You always hope for a classic with any release, but I find myself rooting for one-man bands more than usual, always hoping that some visionary will grace me through the soundwaves, painting fresh vistas or rendering old ones in such sublime detail as to command endless replays from me. I felt this way when I heard Felgraveearlier this year, and while time has only been kind to the mounting esteem I hold that release in, the lookout for other new exemplars of extreme metal art remains ever vigilant. Here is where Tine, a one-man symphonic black/death outfit from the States make their entrance. My body is ready; my ears primed, my senses suitably attuned. Will Tine blow me away?
I mean… not completely, but it’s still pretty damn good. As soon as I heard them I was hurled back up the hourglass to those rose-tinted days of my youth when I first discovered Cradle of Filth. Calling my first flirtatious brushes with Cradle “revelatory” would be a little pompous but not exactly inaccurate. At a stroke, they completely reoriented my listening habits. I loved what metal I’d been fortunate enough to encounter back then – Linkin Park, Evanescence, Limp Bizkit and so on – but Cradle? Fuck me, that was something wholly different, unlike anything I’d heard before. They became a band I’d obsessively consume, buying about as much of their stuff as my faintly concerned parents would permit. Because of that, there’s this wistful sense of nostalgia I’m getting from listening to Tine. Beyond the point that both outfits occupy a vaguely similar musical niche, you can hear it in the bones of Tine’s songs themselves; listen to “A Path Through Frozen Wastes”; hear the riff it opens with, then listen to “Heaven Torn Asunder” by Cradle of Filth – at 2.17, that riff, right there. But the kinship extends beyond genre similarities into the very concepts of the songs themselves; Tine wield these lengthy, audacious tracks that advance through movements, spreading like frost, growing and magnifying as they go. There’s ambition here, and the talent to actualise that ambition through meshing combinations of symphonic and metallic elements, always orotund and powerful yet never simply ostentatious for it’s own sake; all the melodrama, pomp and circumstance to it is slaved with drone-strike precision to the service of the song itself.
To that extent, each song bears a marvellous distinctness from it’s fraters; The ¾ time theatrics of “Ex Cathedra” waltz alongside string flourishes like a cabaret in hell. It dives and swerves about you with bombastic operatic grandeur, layering the depth charge punch of tom drums under it’s solo. There is no mistaking it for the deafening stimulus overload of “A Scathing Blizzard”, which adopts the time-honoured songwriting practice of iniquitous violence; excepting the intro and interlude, it’s the briefest lance in the armoury, substituting venom and vigour for stature, an almost literal Napoleon complex of a track. O’ tempestuous umbral choir! In thine disfavour spare not the heathen the cruellest of vicissitudes! Beauty twins with ire; resplendent orchestration roots worming through black metal fury. The vocals are unusually prominent in the mix to the point that I began to suspect the artist was in the room with me; it works within the context of the album as whole, and if anything spotlights the importance placed on the lyrics and vocal performance overall.
Yet perfection eludes it for a handful of reasons that in general come down to the composition and production. “A Feather From Lucifer’s Wing” for example has this persistent plinking in the background that sounds halfway between an old Nokia ringtone and xylophone fornication – and it repeats with unwelcome irritation on the final track “Winter Horrorscape”, an otherwise stern, uncompromising slab of symphonic blackness that unfortunately appears to have the gentle refrains of my phone’s default alarm clock tune layered over it. The album is possessed of prodigious strength for sure, but even so It can’t always dodge the odd clunky moment; you’ll quite often get these high pitched vocal stabs to accentuate more dramatic moments. They can work but do get a bit overdone at points within “Triumph at Ninevah”. Over time this exsanguination of the flair becomes more obvious, the cadence of it sounding less like a reinforcement of the melodies in the riff and more like the vocalist was intensely surprised and couldn’t work out whether they liked it or not, like they accidentally wore vibrating underwear to work and didn’t realise until they went off in the quarterly budget meeting. Quite often the orchestral elements will just follow the riff, note for note, which isn’t a horrific way to approach things but the release is often at it’s strongest when the instrumentation is allowed to work together but not in lockstep, complimenting but not copying. There are instances of it in “A Path Through Frozen Wastes”, and the enhancement the orchestration offers breathes the coursing wrath of Fenris himself into the work.
It’s a bit bloated in places; an edit wouldn’t have gone amiss, but when there’s so much at play over the course of the album I suppose it shouldn’t surprise that the odd thing can’t nail the dismount; the harvest is otherwise generous – who am I to bemoan the odd sour grape? Ultimately for me the gauge of a black metal album comes down to it’s totality; I watch for an impression, a feeling, a “vibe” if you will. The sounds of a smoking emperyanblasted to atoms, the pure white of marble halls ash-blackened and crumbling, unheard pleas of the angelic host, tattered wings bedraggled and blooded. Not necessarily so specifically sacrilegious , but there must be a broadly successful attempt at evocation, an enforcement of a mood or feeling based purely on the strength of each written note as played. By that standard, Tine succeed – ice renders the earth Impenetrable; no graves are dug, no requiems intoned, the bodies lie where they fell. I don’t know if the artist would be flattered by the comparison to a band like Cradle of Filth– if not I assure you it’s meant as a compliment. I’ve not heard a lot of symphonic black metal this year – there’s so much good metal circulating these days and I am but one pair of ears – but if it’s a sound you’ve been wedded to of late, then please do extent a judicious paw and grab this new Tine release. Try to ignore the frostbite; it’s worth it, I promise.
