### Drudkh / Winterfylleth: Thousands of moons ago / The gates

#### 05/02/14 || sincan

Boy was I like a little kid during Satanmas when it got revealed that mighty Drudkh was going to release a split together with the relatively new schooled and fresh act of Winterfylleth. Even though Drudkh hasn’t succeeded to produce much interesting stuff after “Microcosmos” I tend to hope, as much as I can without being totally naive, that they will get back to their roots and release something in the older caliber. How did they succeed this time? Well, stop watching that porn video you have in the background so that we can get to businesses.

This EP contains four covers of which Drudkh recorded three tracks and Winterfylleth one track. To speak the truth for you, I only recognized one of the covered bands, namely Hate Forest, which is the mastermind of Drudkh’s older band. Drudkh aren’t, at least in this case, self-righteous enough to cover one of Roman’s old tracks so it is of corpse Winterfylleth who did “The Gates”. This whereas Drudkh covered tracks by Hefeystos, Unclean and Sacrilegium from the more obscure Eastern European black metal scene.

The Drudkh part is almost reaching sixteen minutes, which means that three tracks are sharing the same amount of time which one or maybe two typical Drudkh tracks usually does. This is not a problem here since the chosen songs are a bit more straight forward compared to what we are used to. For instance the long instrumental and epic parts are more or less left behind on this one. And thank Satan for dropping the most obvious parts of post-rock they used on “A handful of stars”. Here and there the bass reaches out in the mix and give us something to hold on for whereas the drumming and the guitar melodies are just as good, what else did I expect?

Well it is kind of hard to give these three track a score, since I tend to think about how good Drudkh used to be. But still, these tracks are really great (by that not reaching the same level)! I’m actually slightly positive and this bode well for the future.

You don’t need more than a tenth of a second to realize when Winterfylleth’s contribution kicks in. The warm, thick and organic guitar sound of theirs makes sure of that. An interesting thought about their chosen track is how well it fits their own sound. the riff is extraordinary and by adding “their sound” to it, it surely becomes branded by Winterfylleth’s seal of quality. When the vocals kicks in, a pair of trained ears can hear that there is another type of aggressiveness present, or maybe it’s just my lousy ones getting tricked by the production. However, Winterfylleth is handling this one without losing any pride or dignity.

- Information
- Released: 2014
- Label: Season of Mist
- Website: Drudkh’s facebook
- Website: Winterfylleth’s facebook

Drudkh

- Roman: guitar
- Thurios: vocals, guitar
- Krechet: bass
- Vlad: drums, keyboards

Winterfylleth

- C. Naughton: vocals, guitar
- S. Lucas: drums
- N. Wallwork: bass, backing vocals
- M. Wood: lead guitar

- Tracklist
- 01. …W krainie drzew
- 02. Ten, ktery se vyhyba svetlu
- 03. Recidivus
- 04. The gates