Album Review: Winterfylleth - The Unyielding Season
Reviewed by Eric Clifford
There’s a trio of British black metal bands that always seem to cluster together in my mind: the dearly-missed Wodensthrone, the stark, haunted vistas of Fen, and of course, Winterfylleth. I’ve long held them in high regard as standard bearers for English black metal, yet it wasn’t until this new album swept mist-wreathed and ethereal into the promo list that I realised how shamefully long I’d left it since I last heard one of their releases in full. There might have been an element of personal mortification to it; Years ago, I was at the front row of one of their shows and I coughed with a mouthful of Carlsberg, drenching singer/guitarist Chris Naughton in substandard Danish lager. The last album of theirs that I own – and therefore almost definitely the last I listened to – was “The Divination of Antiquity”, from 2014! Horrified by this abdication of my patriotic duties, I immediately applied to review their new album, hoping only to restore some scant scintilla of lost honour. Whether the album was good or not was less a factor than the possibility of absolution, and hopefully some of that may be on hand, because as it happens this album isn’t just “good”; it’s monumental.
Their riffs don’t snap out at you with the cold inimical scorn of some black metal; they feel choral if that makes any sense. Encompassing. It’s a direly pretentious way to phrase it, but it’s as though their riffs sing at you with these huge, billowing chord resolutions that merge and flow and thicken together, vast blinding drifts of solemn yet triumphal harmonies that sent chills snaking down my spine. It’s grim too – again, not in the snowbound, frostbitten way that you’d get with immortal for example, but instead with a stoical, dutiful sensibility. As though facing an unkind end not out of necessity but because oaths were sworn to do so. Low graves in wait for warriors of high causes. There’s a pride to it, an attachment to the land, its people, its culture. I don’t mean that in a crass nationalistic sense, so much as an affinity for who we are as people. Vikings. Normans. Romans. Plagues. Latterly, the superficially enticing but otherwise corrosive garbage of reform or MAGA types dressing corruption, self absorption and utter disregard for truth as anything other than the obnoxious nonsense it is. And yet... here we are. There’s a stout resistance to this. Perseverance and fortitude. It speaks to me in a way that I was not sure it’s creators intended – but reading through the promo sheet having heard the album in full, you come to this within the first paragraph: “Winterfylleth’s first offering for their new record label is a reflection and a rebellion against the turmoils tearing individuals apart. It is a cry against the unsustainable weight of fear and pressure being pushed into the world, by the agents of a unresting, and unyielding force for evil”. And I think it says more than my own words ever could that this was obvious simply from the way the album sounds alone.
Something that stuck with me was the way Winterfylleth approach chord progressions. There’s an absurdly common one that you will have heard before if you’ve heard almost any amount of music ever – C, G, A minor, F (or a variant of that progression in whatever key you happen to play in). Winterfylleth do use these chords, but on a song like “A Hollow Existence” they instead resolve the progression on a more tormented, minor note. You get the instantly infectious effect of the sequence but instead of the predictable next step they sidestepping your expectations to land on far more sorrowful, thematically appropriate territory. Salted, bitter earth oozing years of accumulated misery. Every other step the band takes through this disconsolate canticle hits the harder for it. The band’s sense of melodicism is so strong, whether they’re opting for diaphanous, maudlin reflection (“Unspoken Elegy”) or enraged defiance (“Perditions Flame”), drums bearing down with that classic kick-snare black metal blast, synths mortaring in the blocks of guitar, bass and drums in this irresistible, onrushing wall of sound. “The Unyielding Season” is just superlative at this, building, building, building, distortion foaming in a saturating deluge, tranquillity in the midsection, an introduction of the melody that hurtles skybound towards the end of the song, layer upon layer of sound, a closing lead line like sunlight harpooning from the heavens. At the height of their powers, Winterfylleth are stunning.
For all that, and despite how undeniably epic it is, at over an hour in length the album does still suffer from a measure of bloat. Paradise Lost are a British institution in their own right but even so the cover of “Enchantment” at the end of the release doesn’t work for me. Stripped of it the album closes on the iron, marching defiance of “Towards Elysium” and the gentle melancholy of “Where Dreams Once Grew” – perfectly, in fewer words. Throwing in a cover version at the end... I don’t know, it feels as though the album attempts to eclipse it’s own valour by substituting someone else’s, it turns an otherwise excellent closure into a false ending, and the clean-sung doom trudge of it is an awkward stylistic pairing with the rest of the album, as well as pushing an already considerable runtime ever further with little benefit in return. Of their own original material though, weaknesses prove elusive, and mostly come down to tweaks I’d prefer opposed to outright problems. Building tension is of course important, and “In Ashen Wake” seems to concur because it spends a lot of time doing it. It’s not bad, granted, but it is one of the few portions of the proper Winterfylleth material that felt as though it could’ve done with a trim – it’s over three minutes before the song kicks into gear, and while it’s effective enough, would it have been impossible to get to the point in, say, two minutes? two and a half?
With the exception of the cover song any other complaints do feel rather toothless. Winterfylleth are massive here, enveloping you in stirring, evocative pieces everywhere from grief to victory to resistance; versatile, but always moving. This drops on the 27th March; so too does another album I had the recent joy of reviewing – “Inexternal Dread” by Rivers Ablaze. That album is a jaw-dropping exercise in progressive black metal, spellbinding in it’s composition and performance. Whether you prefer that album to this is, as ever, a matter of personal preference. All I can say though, is that those of us who like their metal black will be eating like kings on the 27th.
