The melodies have little to no variation, but they slowly make you submerge into a mesmerizing and dark tension, that allows you to immerse yourself into a beautifully melodic, but sinister atmosphere, carefully constructed at the subtle tones of the night, while rearranging and reimagining, piece by piece, the pure elements that fits the most sensitive molecules that builds, note by note, the elusive patterns that consolidates the mood allowed to permeate, construct and activate the resounding significance of the music, at the very own core of its artistic delightful basic primacy.
Nevertheless, besides having its charm, personal charisma, fantastic appeal and a certain level of iconic delicacy, the album is too extensively long, having seventy two minutes. Eventually, despite all of its qualities, you will get bored, and this album will exhaust you, abusing the good will and the good fortune you might have on hearing it. Despite having its share of good moments and beautiful melodies, the album has its deranging level of boredom surpassing its limits. After thirty minutes, with little to aggregate, the listener will start to feel disturbed, and the monotony will start to take your patience away, little by little. At thirty seven minutes, surprisingly, vocals appear on the album, which is the only element that I could possibly characterize on this record as being black metal.
With the vocals, the tone and the atmosphere of the record become more stagnant, aggressive, suffocating, sinister and incisively severe, changing dramatically the sensibility of the music. You could possibly feel at this moment that, until the vocals begun, all that you were listening was like a mere introduction, since the atmosphere was softer until the vocals begun. The singing part really introduces another vibe into the album, way more compressed, nefarious and lugubrious. Nevertheless, despite giving the album an interesting change of pace, it does very little do diminish the sense of monotony. All in all Sleep, Die! Cold Winter is a good album, with interesting melodies and beautiful passages, but fails to be more than that. In the end, it is just another good and mostly instrumental album, with an interesting slow mood, having that innocent, outworn and gratuitous label of DSBM attached to it. Not a bad record after all, but not a fundamental milestone either.
Wagner