Coldworld
The Stars Are Dead Now

A boy wakes up thinking of a girl. Normal. His complicated mental paths, the rejection in his heart. He approaches a guitar passively, barely touching it, without any intention of playing it. He only desires silence. Like a cat, he approaches his pc. He turns it on and wonders what he can do. To escape, to withdraw, to not suffer. He concludes that there is no way and that suffering is an inseparable companion of man. And it is the sovereign that governs all life. Therefore, he decides to hurt himself, to pierce that piece of heart he has left. Among his CDs, he chooses one. It's not particularly significant; it's an Ep he's listened to a couple of times, but he liked it from the start. It is precisely "The Stars Are Dead Now," coming from the cold of the North.

The album opens with the slow and relentless "This Empty Life," icy and unique in its progression. The voice underneath is crackling, dark, in full Dark-Ambient style. In the listener's mind appear visions of snow-covered steppes, hibernating animals, and a flower, already close to death, sprouting in this void. The heart already begins to skip a beat; her face looms, like a "dark lady" of Shakespeare, over the violent initial notes of "Hate," the second track of the Ep. Compared to the first, the greater musical violence is immediately noticeable, with its explosiveness emerging in the singer's rasps. "Cancer" continues in the style of the previous track. Here, one can immediately notice the significant influence of a certain type of Black Metal on the band in question, due to the presence of rather pressing drumming in the first part of the song. The next track, "Suicide," perhaps the most suggestive of the album, in which Georg Borner gives his best. Very melancholic, but overall less cold than the previous tracks, it is ennobled by the main riff, which strikes deep in the soul, already shattered into a thousand pieces by the previous tracks. If this song has the task of completely dismembering the interiority, and piercing it, to better awaken it and make it suffer, the final track, "The Old Ghost in the Well," has the precise task of nullifying and destroying what remains. The heavy tolls are almost infernal, the keyboards resonate darkly, in a demonic choir with a bittersweet and martial flavor at the same time. It is not the fastest track in question, but the darkest, most harrowing, and somber. The vision becomes blurry, as the minutes pass. The suffering, the profound, existential, and unique pain leads to the expansion of the soul, to its complete opening and destruction. A theft of feelings, a robbery of emotions.

Not much remains at the end of this Ep. For the initial boy, the awareness remains that will is not power and that in life, nothing is given. That love is a feeling like any other. That she is not as beautiful, good, and perfect as you think. That perhaps, with the final notes of "The Old Ghost in the Well," your love is incorporated. But apathy remains, the pain is more screaming than ever. The storm, this black scream, is the prelude, however, to final peace, the moment when, exhausted by the listening, vibrant and intense, you can abandon yourself to reflections. Perhaps her face still looms, and Coldworld was just a momentary palliative that diverted targeted pain into existential anxiety. Not always is pain negative, then. The beginnings, the start of this journey in the northern lands, perhaps was only wasted time, making that boy brood over the final condition of the human species. But when the evil enters through the ears to escape from the chest, then perhaps life is not lost. Only a scream should be launched. A cry against everything that haunts us. To reach the very end, always.