AN NCS INTERVIEW: GÖDEN

 Interviews  1 Response »
Nov 112024
 

(Delayed by both external events and our editor’s foot-dragging, we finally present our Comrade Aleks‘ interview of Stephen Flam, an original member of the seminal NYC band Winter and a founder of Göden, whose second album Vale of the Fallen (the main subject of the interview) was released by Svart Records last May.)

About thirty-five years ago, the heavy, rusty, clanking Winter thundered through the New York City underground. Over time, the young trio, making sloppy death-doom, entered the pantheon of genre pioneers whose names are known mostly to doom-heads, but then the band simply fell apart after their first album Into Darkness (1990).

Winter’s guitarist Stephen Flam returned with two confederates as Göden in 2020: Betty (“Vas”) Lakkas aka Nxyta (Goddess of Night) on vocals and Tony Pinnisi aka The Prophet of Goden on keyboards. With the new album Vale of the Fallen, Göden continued this year the direction they took on their debut, Beyond Darkness (2020): unusual, but uncomfortable and categorically gloomy post-apocalyptic doom with hoarse female vocals. Continue reading »

REVISITING THE CLASSICS: WINTER’S “INTO DARKNESS”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Oct 192011
 

(TheMadIsraeli contributes another look-back at a classic album of metal.)

Winter are a band who have remained unfairly underrated and unrecognized in the metal landscape.  These guys virtually created the deathdoom style, and on the basis of their only full-length album, they still qualify as the heaviest, most morbid, and most brutal band in the entire sub-genre; AND THIS ALBUM IS 21 YEARS OLD NOW!

What I am revisiting today is the original version of the album.  Winter’s Into Darkness can be purchased on disk along with an EP called Eternal Frost that was released in 1994. Despite being a whole new batch of material, the EP feels perfectly at home on the same disc with Into Darkness.  But for those who are interested, you can get Into Darkness from Southern Lord Records on its own without the EP.

Into Darkness is so dank, so dark, so putrid and vile you can literally feel and imagine yourself walking through sewage and corpses as you listen to it.  Winter were only a three piece, a small band for the time and still small by modern convention, but the three of them produced such unheard of sounds that the music must have come as a shock in contrast to the rest of what was going on in 1990.  Tuning their instruments down to A for fucking abysmal was something that had to have sounded nuts back then, at least in the States, though we know that even by this time, Swedish bands were tuning their instruments down to the same or similar keys. Continue reading »