It must have been 25 years ago to the month that I first heard US death/doom icons Winter for the first time. I remember it clearly: spring was already turning warm, the end of school was just a few weeks away, and I had a little money to spend. So of course I went to Spine Center in Helsinki to spend that cash.

For some reason this blue tinted album caught my eye. Winter? Never heard of them. There was precious little information on the digipak (Nuclear Blasts’ 1999 issue). No booklet. No line-up info. No liner notes. No nothing. But there was something about the release that piqued my interest.

Obscurity was part of the beauty of those days. There was no Discogs, no Metal Archives back then. Search engines were a whole different breed of primitive. Put “Winter death metal” into Altavista and see what comes up… well, back then, a whole lot of nothing relevant! And you certainly didn’t have a smartphone hooked to the Internet in your pocket, so when you were in the record store, you couldn’t just google what the heck it was you were holding in your hands.

And so I bought, as we Finns say, a pig in a sack e.g., had no idea what it was that I bought.

And was confronted with something I really didn’t know what it was. “Death/doom” wasn’t something a much more juvenile me knew anything about. To me, death metal was blasting and furious, like Deicide and Morbid Angel. Not slow, lurching, heavy, like Celtic Frost on half speed.

I wasn’t quite ready for it at that age. I loved Servants Of The Warsmen from the go, but much of the rest just confounded me. To my great regret, I eventually sold that copy of the album to a friend.

As luck would have it, I stumbled upon Metal Minds Productions’ slightly more informative 2008 release exactly ten years later, in 2009. Finally I learned something about this short-lived US band, who released a demo, an EP and an album during their brief run, and became absolute legends of slow, heavy, doomy death metal.

And this time around, I got it. The otherworldly, psychedelic, crushing heaviness. The primitive Celtic Frost riffing. The gruff vocals. The droning experimentalism. I got it all. And I saw even deeper into the DNA of Winter: in equal parts to the metal, if not even more, Winter were about early crust punk. Doom slowed down to a tenth of their furious tempos.

In so many ways, Winter were both ahead of their time and unique. Living in the cross section between many different strands of heavy and extreme music, Winter did something nobody had ever done, and in a way nobody has done to this day. There is only one Winter – that much is proven by the very lacklustre “successor project” Göden.

Yes, obscurity was a part of the beauty of those formative years of my musical taste. There was a strong appeal in buying a CD based on the cover alone, and perhaps never learning who were behind the project and the story behind the album and the artist.

But on the other hand, my appreciation of Winter only grew when I learned something about them. When I understood where in the history of extreme music to place them, and how innovative they were back then. And how well their music has stood the test of time. So if there is beauty in obscurity, then there’s also beauty in its opposite.

Pictured in the top picture is the aforementioned Metal Minds Productions re-release from 2009, alongside with Svart Records’ 2020 vinyl edition. This was one of those albums I rushed to preorder instantly when Svart announced it, even though I had it on CD already. Some albums just are good enough to own in several formats.

Spinning the compilation now, I am still as mesmerized by Winter’s desolate, dark and nightmarishly psychedelic soundscapes. They have lost none of their potency throughout all these years.

RISE!

---

In From The Vaults we take a dive into the record collection at Only Death Is Real HQ and write about about items of iconic stature or personal significance; rarities and oddities from the archives; obscure gems that deserve more attention; classics of yore deserving of a moment in the limelight; and so on.