For their first two releases, Cold In Berlin showcased a fiery amalgam of old-school punk and hooky 80s goth-worship that placed a legitimate run at the mainstream well within their grasp. But what a difference five years can make.
On their latest, the London quartet haven’t so much abandoned those early influences as wrapped them in old blankets, soaked them in kerosene and tossed them onto a raging funeral pyre.
The Comfort Of Loss & Dust explores darker, heavier realms – a blasphemous avalanche of doomy, detuned guitars and lumbering cyclopean tempos that more closely evoke comparisons to Electric Wizard than to Siouxsie & The Banshees. On Natural Order and the exhilarating Dopamine, bone-crushing riffs and sharp dynamics counterpoint to the record’s gravitational heaviness.
Although it marks a radical departure, scant variation separates the new tracks, which also rely a bit too heavily on well-worn doom-gaze tropes. Still, The Comfort… places CIB squarely in the ‘ones to watch’ category./o:p
