Liverpool Sound and Vision Rating 9/10

There is a quiet solemnity and gravitas in the frozen landscape that winter offers Humanity but which is shamefully overlooked by modern society in its constant pursuit of the need to be seen to be productive, productive in the disturbingly wrong way, not the industry of creative endeavour in which a field stuffed with snow captures the bleating sheep unawares and provides the captured moment for the ever present photographer. Nor in the way that a sudden snowfall on a busy city can bring it grinding to a halt causing people to stay indoors and forcing them to rest a while, perhaps talk or at least wrestle with their conscious on how Winter was at one time a chance to take stock and to mourn those lost before the snow, not to sell stock and forget to mourn the passing of time.

For Winter in Eden, conscience is king and what better way to show this than in the band’s third album Court of Conscience. A piece of work so distilled in a brutally heavenly atmosphere, so direct in its message that it could stand shoulder to shoulder, paw to paw with the very best that has come out of Scandinavia in the last few years.

Listening to Winter In Eden, the listener is struck by the rampaging exquisiteness that comes at the ears like a thousand swords aimed at Grendel’s misshapen and dark diseased body. It is an album in which the songs beg you to try and cry out mercy, in which salvation is sought and sanctuary is offered. Winter may be unforgiving, the stark bleakness it provides and the explosion of whiteout it presents last longer than the whiteness associated with a nuclear blast but it also offer hope, the urge to live through its icy embrace and seek renewal, that’s what Winter In Eden offers fans of the British melodic Metal genre, the chance to revel once more in the spring of a new generation of musicians more than capable of matching anything that comes out of Scandinavia.

The wolf maybe at the door but in songs such as Critical Mass Part 1, Toxicate, Order Of Your Faith, the blistering The Script and Constant Tomorrows it will slink away, starving to death, short of breath and die in a pain reserved for those who cause untold misery, who act without conscious or mercy.

Winter is coming, and the Court of Conscience is a great place to take stock of what is happening around you.

Ian D. Hall