The cover of this screams black metal – black and white, gothic font, skulls, but this is as far from black metal (musically that is) as you can get within the rock world. Lyrically and subject wise ‘Berlin Occult Bureau’ is in the same darkened realm as the black metal hordes it’s just in a different time and space. They could even have been the band for a groovy seventies Hammer Horror about a bunch of long haired miscreants off to sell their souls.
Winters take influence from many musical sources, the most obvious is the swirling psychedelics of the mid to late sixties interwoven with early seventies heavy rock, but such a simple description doesn’t do this album justice. This isn’t some upstarts trying to jump on the Ghost bandwagon of re-hashed occult rock, far from it, Winters have been around since 2005 and had two releases on Rise Above, they also have a much wider net of influences (than some of the bands in the same field) from the then and now. Indie shoegaze swirls merge with Nirvana like riffing and vocals on the hypnotic ‘Schwarze Kraft‘ whilst the title track could have lurched from an Unsane album, it being all minimal grinding bass/guitar riff across a slow tribal beat, it’s only the vocals and the Sabbath like breakdown that snap you into realising that it isn’t New York’s finest.
Winters also have a massive stoner/doom stream running through the album, the whole thing seems impossibly laid back, but never sloppy, this is mainly due to the breathy style vocals that take the tracks into that spacey stoned area, and the relaxed spiraling guitars.
So, if you are looking for something that sits in between Spaceman 3, Blue Oyster Cult, The Cardiacs and Black Sabbath then this is it.
(Alex Boniwell 7/10)
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