Two things jumped out at me about this release before I’d even listened to a single note of it. The first being that, after a good few weeks of mild meteorological chaos and temperatures going up and down like a yoyo, it is finally definitely getting colder. And what better soundtrack to that than an album that describes itself as “Winterdoom”? And who doesn’t like a new genre every so often as a little treat? The second being that it’s not often you get a band to review through Ave Noctum whose most recent releases include a Bananarama cover – Cruel Summer.

[Her Cold Materials doesn’t include Cruel Summer, but it’s worth listening to in its own right.]

So, from where I’m sitting, we’re off to a flying start, and that’s before I’ve even opened the download.

Getting into the album itself, Phantom Winter justify the Winterdoom description straight out of the gate, with an unrelenting wave of doomy, sludgy goodness that – in true doom style – takes its sweet time getting itself established before it even thinks about going anywhere. Even the vocals take a while to arrive, because well, if it were in any kind of hurry, it wouldn’t be doom of any flavour, would it?

From this point onwards, the album follows much the same template throughout (which could be a bad thing, but it’s mostly not in this case): a lumbering, graceless beat underpins much of it, interspersed with interludes of varying sorts, before skulking back into the sludgy morass. Some of these interludes are positively skeletal by metal standards, consisting of little more than a barking drumbeat and snatches of sparse, barely-there melodies. And when I say “barely-there”, I mean as in I keep finding myself unconsciously leaning down to hear them better, despite actually listening to this on headphones. It’s not that they’re inappropriately quiet, it’s more that they feel like they’re far away and you can only just hear them.

Other breaks in the sludge are punctuated by sharp, slicing piano rhythms in a way that keeps taking me back to Meds-era Placebo – part of Her Wound is Grave could slip into Follow the Cops Back Home and barely miss a beat. Sort of what would happen if Brian decided to try and make a sludge album, minus the sex, drugs and rock’n’roll references. Or alternatively, Mogwai as they were on the superlative Earth Division, especially Get to France, where the piano provides not only the melody, but the core rhythm that the rest hangs together on. And to continue the post-rock comparison, there are also a number of spoken word elements that could so easily be a German Maybeshewill. This includes a fantastic passage that contains the line “humans do not bounce off concrete…well”, the intonation of which (correctly) implies that humans do bounce off concrete, but not particularly well. Which is somehow (presumably unintentionally) hilarious when heard in the context of otherwise unremarkable metal lyrics.

There are a lot of other influences and styles in play here, including some unexpectedly nu-metalesque shouty vocals dotted across the album (I’m reminded forcibly of Casey Chaos in places), which contrast nicely with the growly ones and the black metalish chattering demon type voices. The black metal references are especially interesting, because in places Her Cold Materials actually sounds not unlike a slower, more expansive take on second wave black metal, only with a menacing, slowburn loathing taking the place of the genre’s usual brittle, breakneck fury. This is festering, sprawling distaste with infinite patience, rather than the spiky, razor-sharp ferocity of straight second wave, which means it inhabits a slightly out of the way spot between black metal and quite a few genres. There’s post, doom, sludge, black and various other things in here, but it’s not quite close enough to any of them to be neatly put in a box. I can’t even adequately describe it with a crossover: blackened doom is…reasonably close, but still doesn’t quite capture going on here.

The really weird thing, however, is it’s actually nowhere near as chaotic and disjointed as the above makes it sound. In fact, the album as a whole works far better than it has any business doing. This is mainly because, for all the many and varied things going on under the bonnet, there’s an incredibly strong uniting factor that seeps into every beat, note, whatever. Yes, you can have a cracking game of spot the influence/genre with this album, but every last one of them is coming at you from under the same thick, suffocating fog of doom, scuzz and sludge, which hangs over the entire album like an entity in its own right. It’s an interesting effect to say the least, and a bit like trying to make sense of a distant music festival, heard in the kind of monstrously thick fog that clings to you like a blanket, distorting and dampening everything around you.

And finally, the real question is: is Winterdoom a thing, or are Phantom Winter just trying to make themselves sound more interesting? I mean, usually when bands try and claim they’re a never-seen-before genre, it’s pretty firmly the latter. And the honest answer is, I’m not sure. They’re definitely doing something different, and whatever else it is for better or worse, it’s certainly evocative and fairly distinctive. If you have existing soft spots for the genres involved, you could do a lot worse than take a wander in the Phantom Winter fog.

(7.5/10 Ellie)

https://www.facebook.com/wintercvlt

https://thischarmingmanrecords.bandcamp.com/album/tcm-144-phantom-winter-her-cold-materials