Relentlessly Anthemic, Enveloping, Desperate Epics From Paysage D’Hiver

by delarue

As Paysage D’Hiver, Swiss multi-instrumentalist Wintherr (the name is a German pun) has built a vast, distinctive, obsessively focused body of work that blends elements of dreampop, no wave, black metal, classical and film music. It’s often impenetrably dense: the guitars typically sound like they’ve been recorded through a brick wall. Yet Wintherr’s towering neoromantic themes are just as catchy and anthemic, He likes endless washes of chords, with simple, purposeful minor-key riffs layered over them. He doesn’t take solos here, at least in the traditional sense. The vocals are in German, his guttural roar buried deeper in the mix than anything else, even the bass: this is a pretty trebly record.

The name of the project – French for “winter landscape” – reflects a single existential metaphor: an interminable winter walk. There is a plotline with a lot of jump cuts: the beginning and ending have already been released, or so it seems at this point. Narrative-wise, this latest epic installment, Im Wald (In the Woods) falls somewhere in the middle and is streaming at Bandcamp.

This is a long album, two hours worth of songs that go on for almost twenty minutes at times. With its relentlessly pummeling beats and loops – all of which sound organic – it will jar you awake at high volume: it’s great driving music. Yet at low volume it’s soothing, validating Wintherr’s sense for a good tune. Loops of what sounds like a man walking pretty briskly across muddy terrain are interspersed between the songs. Wintherr breaks up the relentless, reverb-iced attack with calmer, more brooding interludes where keyboards (or a keyboard patch) come to the forefront.

There’s a point where the music recedes to a forlorn minor-key guitar loop and the walking man sets up camp for the night. Everything gets more orchestral, desperate, and slightly more rhythmically diverse from there: a recurrent riff toward the end is absolutely bloodcurdling. It’s hard to think of a more apt album for the year of the lockdown, so many of us trudging onward, atomized and alone, running out of money and food and losing hope, one eye on the road ahead, the other on the Trace and Track gestapo and the spectre of the death camps. And they said it could never happen here.