Reviews list for Paysage d'Hiver - Die Berge (2024)

Swiss atmospheric black metal solo-act Paysage d'Hiver has been somewhat of a mainstay of my extreme metal diet since first discovering Darkspace guitarist & Kunsthall Produktionen label owner Tobias Möckl (or Wintherr as he likes to known as) through the 1999 self-titled Paysage d'Hiver demo some ten years after initial release. While I do think that demo was a touch overrated as I'm not sure I can say that I believe it to be a genuine black metal classic, a number of Paysage d'Hiver's subsequent releases have seen me being taken further into the deepest depths of some of the darkest & most frostbitten Scandinavian landscapes in existence. I should highlight 2001's classic "Winterkaelte" demo & Wintherr's spectacular 2020 debut album "Im Wald" (my personal favourite) in particular as well as 2013's excellent "Das Tor" as essential examples of the atmospheric black metal sound although there is plenty of quality to be found across the vast majority of Paysage d'Hiver's esteemed back catalogue. Which leads me to the Swiss icons latest release, the 2024 sophomore album "Die Berge", another immense & undeniably lengthy slab of icy black metal designed specifically to take the listener to unfamiliar & very imposing places. My anticipation for this record was very high so I wasted no time in checking it out as soon as it was released a couple of months ago but knew full well that it would require a significant investment of time to fully understand so waited until my traditional January new release purge to review it in full.

"Die Berge" sounds very much as you would expect from a new Paysage d'Hiver record to be honest. Wintherr maintains complete creative control of his project, producing every second of the album himself & releasing it through his own label. The production is (unsurprisingly) as cold as ice, fully embracing the traditional lo-fi aesthetic that Möckl has played such a role in popularizing over the years to great effect with the textural guitars blurring together in a wall of fuzzy noise which sees the synthesizers often being tasked with maintaining the melodic component. Wintherr's vocals are certainly more deathly than you would usually expect on a black metal release, sitting largely in space that's usually consumed by the death metal crowd, but his truly monstrous tone & unnerving delivery is one of the clear highlights of this admittedly fairly indulgent release. My main gripe is an obvious one however. It's not surprising to find Wintherr employing a drum machine to produce the drum tracks as that's a very common thing amongst the atmospheric black metal crowd these days but it's the way that he's done it that bothers me a little. The slower material isn't such an issue but I can't deny that the faster pieces (particularly the relentlessly brutal "Ausstieg") are effected by the fact that the drums sound so obviously artificial & offer so little in the way of fills, rolls or variety. In a seventeen minute track that rarely ceases in its use of blast-beats, that can be a challenge & I can't deny that it's affected my overall score which is a testament to just how incredible Wintherr's understanding of the black metal genre is. You see, the rest of the music here is nothing short of historic with some of the pieces even challenging the great Burzum records of the mid-1990's for sheer dark & otherworldly atmosphere. I honestly don't think there is anyone in the modern scene that can touch Paysage d'Hiver in this regard.

The tracklisting is without blemish but there are a number of songs that need to be highlighted as genuine black metal classics in my opinion. The best of these can be found in the savage "Verinnerlichung" & the trance-inducing "Transzendenz III", both of which are about as perfect as representation of the black metal genre as you'll find. Opener "Urgrund" & the more stripped back, Burzum-inspired "Transzendenz II" aren't too far behind either & would surely be lapped up by any self-respecting member of our The North clan. Epic closer "Gipfel" is worth mentioning too as it takes an instrumental doom/death approach that stands out as being a bit different for Wintherr. It's done very well though & makes for a solid way to end the 103-minute journey through the some of the least habitable places on the planet.

"Die Berge" is another Tobias Möckl masterpiece as far as I'm concerned which makes the impact of the drum programming even more frustrating than it might otherwise have been. You see, I can easily see this record being one of the great black metal albums of all time but it's taken down a peg by those mechanical rhythms that often detract a little from the precision that Paysage d'Hiver goes about creating his transformative art. The rest of the instrumentation is simply so primitive with the vocals being summoned up from the very back of the darkest cave in all the world so the mechanical, artificial nature of some of the beats seems to fight against it to an extent. Thankfully, Wintherr is a master technician of his craft so I still can't help but to buy into the product he's pushing. No one has come this close to touching Varg Vikernes in all the years since 1996's life-changing "Filosofem" fourth Burzum album but I'll be damned if Möckl doesn't match him here on occasion which has resulted in my second-favourite Paysage d'Hiver release behind "Im Wald". "Die Berge" should be essential listening for devotees of the more atmospheric end of the black metal spectrum.

For fans of Darkspace, Lunar Aurora & Burzum.