Artist: Winter Gate
Album: Disillumination
Label: Independent
Release Date: March 13, 2012
When you start a band, the first question which comes to your mind is “What will the genre of the band be?” Most of metal bands incline towards thrash, death or progressive. But here is a band, which restrained from being included in any one particular genre and decided to experiment with every influence they ever had. The band is none other than the Old School-Progressive-Thrash-Death Metal band hailing from the Pink City Jaipur, Winter Gate – a band that “brings up true and pure death metal all in a progressive environment”.
Apart from their fantastic OCs, their performance set list often features a nice amalgamation of progressive and old school covers of Obituary, Death and Opeth, indicative of the band’s influences. The band started with the name ‘Alath’, playing thrash covers, changed into a death metal band ‘War Autopsy’ in between and finally became ‘Winter Gate’. With Devashish Dutt on vocals and guitars, Lovenish Sharma on guitars, Ankit Yadav on bass(departed from the band on February 9, 2013) and Sudeep Saxena on drums, Winter Gate released their first EP on 13th March 2012, by the name, “DisIllumination”.
The EP consists of three songs; the first song, ‘Beyond the Light’ being a keyboard instrumental, has a soothing classical-ish progression which gives a perfect start to the EP. It is followed by the track ‘A Wreath of Mist’. The song has excellent old school progressions, a lot of brutal riffs to headbang on and some awesome heart-bleeding solos. The harsh vocals are nicely done and certainly give a very nice listening experience. The song has many transitions which take place through faultlessly crafted bridges. But the outro of the song gets a bit dull and sort of monotonous in comparison to the rest of the song and it certainly could have sounded much better with some variations in it.
‘Death’s Embrace’ gives you an even greater will to bang your head to the super-heavy sound of guitars. The fast tempo at some places makes you jump into a moshpit (sadly I was in an empty room when I first heard the song). The overall quality of composition in the song is even better than the previous track. The break which appears at 5:30, is followed by a clean progression, which could have sounded more evil if a dull tone had been used. The mood of the song is enhanced when the same progression is played on distorted guitars.
A lot of talent can be seen throughout the record. The work on guitars has been splendid all over the album. Look out for the sublime guitar harmonies embedded seamlessly with nice old school riffs. The EP, at many instances, reminds me of Opeth’s first album ‘Orchid’, displaying a similar gloomy yet aggressive nuance on the songs. The drumming has also been quite admirable; the odd time signatures have been nicely maintained and the double bass has been laid impeccably with the tremolo picked riffs.
The production of the EP is very good for a debutant, although the sound could have been more polished. The patch used for distortion on guitar is sharp and doesn’t go with the deep growled vocals. Whatsoever, the instruments have been nicely panned and the tracks have fair amount of dynamics.
Summing up, the EP is kick-ass and a must for heavy listeners. The band obviously has a great potential and we look forward to a smashing full length from the band. Listen to Winter Gate on ReverbNation
