Violet Cold - kOsmik

I had just got done talking about how I completlely missed Violet Cold’s three-part ambient post-rock release last year and I very nearly did just the same for kOsmik here, which was released months ago. Sommermorgen’s three parts showcased the band’s more soothing side and made for a much more easy-going, background ambiance kind of project than what they usually go for. It’s certainly not bad for the purpose it serves, 

The album opens with a tastefully post-metallic wave of ethereal guitar distortion on the song, “Contact”, which very nearly resembles much of This Will Destroy You’s earlier works, and welcomes Violet Cold back to their more metallic roots in fine ceremony. The album’s second song, “Black Sun”, however, jumps right into the deep end of their metallic side. A much more vibrant and metallic piece that incorporates both ethereal and brooding blackgaze, spacey post-rock, and emotive clean guitar-driven moments of peace, it’s a well-representative picture of Violet Cold’s laudable proficiency despite their lack of stylistic originality. The band’s return to the very Deafheaven-inspired blackgaze that made them continues on the subsequent “Mamihlapinatapai”, which still incorporates some more brightly colored bits of atmospheric major-scale guitar work near its finish to keep it from being too reminiscent of Deafheaven, but this part of the song feels somewhat out of place and shoehorned in to give it an artificial sense of greater emotional dynamic.

On the topic of Deafheaven similarity though, I was listening to Roads to Judah just yesterday, and the song “Space Funeral” (on kOsmik, for clarification) does sound like it could have come straight off that album. The album luckily hits its high point immediately afterward with the cathartic combination of melodic blackgaze guitar leads and deep blackened bellowing growls of “Ultraviolet”. I see it as a high point largely because it does find the band reaching for a wider variety of sounds to take a more creative route to the type of ether they’re clearly trying to maintain on this album, and this is an experiment that shines well and shows that the band do not need to be tracing Deafheaven’s or Hammock’s or This Will Destroy You’s footsteps to get to their intended destination.

The album unfortunately seems to have expended all its leftover novelty after “Ultraviolet” finishes as the dragging title track and the closing piano-led ambient piece, “Ai(R )”, round the album off in the duller atmospheric blackgaze fashion, not really bringing anything new to the table or doing anything particularly convincing with the genre’s basic building blocks. The closing track isn’t really all too offensive by any means; it’s just a nice ambient little piano ditty after all. It just feels like a bit of a fizzle out after the creatively vacuous title track.

After focusing mostly on the lighter side of their sound on their three-part album last year, kOsmik is a welcome return to Violet Cold’s more representatively balanced sound, though their return to blackgaze this year serves as a reminder as highlighted as ever that they are followers, not leaders in their field, which is not an inherently bad thing to be. They certainly show themselves to be at least competent followers, and the album’s best moments show that they can find ways to conceal their pursuit’s directness, which I hope they can maybe improve on in the future.

This Deaf Explosion in the Russian Hammock Will Destroy Heaven/10