Sieghetnar ‎"Kältetod" CD

Limited edition contains a white instead of a black disc tray. Comes with a 4-page booklet.

The eighth full-length album by German Black Metal/Ambient band.
Actually, this album is the new version of the fourth full-length album, “Kältetod”, remastered and with added vocals.
Trancezendental Ambient Black Metal!

It's hard to say exactly why this album works so much better than the earlier Sieghetnar material I've heard- it's not exactly stylistically different- but it absolutely does. I might just chalk it up to a couple years worth of maturing as a songwriter, but I think it might be a little deeper than that. Sieghetnar, of course, is the German ambient black metal project that basically takes entirely after Vinterriket and released an album in a made-up language, which is the only reason anyone knows the project, but behind all that is a one-man endeavor which can actually write some songs. 'Kältetod' is a surprisingly strong album where the whole is much more than the sum of its parts- it's definitely not going to change the world, but it's a very solid ambient black metal album which stands up to multiple listens well and is about as atmospheric as one could ever ask.
The ingredients here are the same as on earlier Sieghetnar work: instrumental material based off slow, delayed walls of guitars, quiet, programmed drums, and synths which form the bulk of the melodic voice. The guitars are really background noise, just harmonizing with the root notes of the synth melodies; there's no real 'riffs' to mention, just hazy, blurring walls of two or three chords at a time, tremolo picked in the background. This isn't a particularly exciting or riffy album; it's more about soaking in the snowy atmosphere. The keys do all the heavy melodic lifting because of this, and they're well composed, bouncing intelligently off of the riffs, and the lack of vocals actually works to the benefit of this album's music overall, since there's really no logical place to put them and it would just end up distracting from the melodic voices. Well, these descriptions are well and good for the monolithic title track (some patience is clearly required for this music), but the ambient intro and outro, as well as the highly minimal synth track 'Flug Des Rabens' are even more compressed in style. If the title track simply wasn't enough minimalism for you, you'll have the other tracks to look forward to. More impressive is the fact that 'Flug Des Rabens' is actually well composed as well; lush, overlapping synth tones explore a pretty conventional but nonetheless compelling musical space in a manner that has just a hint of cheese but a lot of earnestness to offset it. I'm usually not that into black metal artists trying their hand at ambient, but I have a feeling the sole member of Sieghetnar is the opposite: he's approaching black metal from an ambient standpoint rather than the other way around.
Obviously all your tolerance of this music is based off whether you like droning, starkly minimal black metal, but fans of the Vinterriket style will no doubt find plenty to like here. Yeah, it has something of a bedroom vibe, but fuck it, the melodies are good and have an amateurish intelligence to them which is usually found in good black metal. Give it a shot if you find it.

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