The music that Cold In Berlin play isn't necessarily complex or out-of-the-box, having with clear similarities and influences that makes listening to them evoke a familiar feel. But what they do have is a tendency to pull from more than one source of inspiration in a way that makes their songs feel like variations of familiar sounds, never simply one sound evoked. There's also a very interesting progression of sound, enough to pinpoint where the band pivoted from taking more from one and less from another.
More specifically, the first two albums, Give Me Walls and ...And Yet sounding more in line with gothic/post-punk bands of the kind I usually cover in the non-metal feature, but with the twist being that vocalist Maya's vocals being more voluminous in a hard rock way while still keeping all the gothic affectations, something that reminded me of how the vocals made Gaupa or Jess And The Ancient Ones stand out for me. It was The Comfort Of Loss & Dust where something changed in the band's DNA to make the guitars much fuzzier and to push the gloom in a louder more distorted direction that would make them fit for their presence on a metal website. Rituals Of Surrender only solidified that move towards a more metallic sound.
Wounds follows theoretically the longest gap between releases, six years after the previous album, but in actuality that gap was broken by last year's The Body Is The Wound EP, a hefty appetizer that foreshadowed the changes that have now occurred on Wounds. In short, Wounds both brings back more elements from the first two albums, bringing back a post-punk touch to the gothic side of the sound, while also pushing things forward by expanding the bits of electronica from The Body Is The Wound into something more akin to EBM or darkwave.
The electronic part is especially interesting, with the synths arriving courtesy of David Whiting aka Bow Church, with the resulting soundscape fitting Cold In Berlin like a glove. Of course, the most heavy lifting is still done by Maya Wittleton's vocals, whose commanding presence feels like it contains the kind of darkness that would fit both occult psych rock and goth rock but whose voluminous power resonates with the more traditional sounding doom metal, while being entrancing enough that it makes the vocal repetitions that the songwriting relies on more memorable.
Considering how so far Cold In Berlin's discography seems to operate in pairs, in which the second of the pair goes even harder on one aspect of the first of the pair, I'm curious to see if the band will go even further in an electronic direction the next time, if they'll pivot again, or if they'll stick to a working formula. Whatever the case, what they've made with Wounds is some of the most entrancing almost-metal of this kind I've heard in a while.
