Review by Rexorcist for Paysage d'Hiver - Paysage d'Hiver (1999)

First things first: the bad audio quality hits you hard and heavy almost on instant.  But somehow this demo managed to help influence future players in the black metal scene.  This is because of its heavy snowstorm aesthetic, but for the most part, it doesn't remain that way on end until the end of each of these three sons.  They're all 17.5 minutes plus, so thankfully our artist is smart enough to know that he should be mixing things up some.  The noisy backgrounds only slightly drown out any screaming vocals or ambient noises that crawl out of the snow in desperate need of body warmth.  Now I often joke that black metal can be used as a musical white noise machine, but in this album's case, it's totally true.  This is one of the primary examples of letting atmosphere do the talking with slow-moving melodies that carry your soul rather than your body, and the backing effects and tunes help with that.  And not every single minute is drenched in the noisy tremolos and noise backdrops, allowing for the backing sounds to take the foreground and the background whenever necessary.  So this is an album all about the feeling and the soul of the atmosphere.  While the only superstrong point in the entire album is how well the low production qualities were utilized, the everything else is pretty good, so Paysage d'Hiver proved that he was fully capable of doing more with less on the first go.  This format would lead him to do many other albums under the same basic format, but this remains one of his absolute best.

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