ALBUM REVIEW: Lorefrost – Snowspire

The winter seasons are often quite a whirlwind for people, with last minute deadlines and festivities to plan and decorate for. We can often forget to embrace the darkness, the cold and the heritage of the season. SNOWSPIRE have offered up another haunting ambient collection that will spark your imagination in the long dark of winter.

Hoarfrost Lamentations is a perfect name for SNOWSPIRE‘s haunting ambience. Hoarfrost is the thin, wispy frost that forms over fields and fences. It gets its name from old English, wherein hoar meant hair. This link back into language and its imagery is quite evocative if you give some time to contemplate it. The thought of a fragile, ever-constant but often overlooked part of the season, something that gets on everything, that seeps into all corners of the cold. Paired with second motion Dreamlike & Crystalline, these two tracks are a 40-minute soundtrack for those dark and contemplative days and nights around this time of year in the northern hemisphere.

What stands out, oddly, is the sound of static. Ever present in the stillness, just behind waves of what feels like spirits on the wind. There are layers that feel like voices all of their own within the synths. What exactly they’re saying is a story you write yourself.

What’s for certain is there is a distance and an expansiveness to these rolling swells that personifies the world of frost. Hoarfrost Lamentations and Dreamlike & Crystalline while essentially just a looping surge of ambience, demonstrate the inevitability of the cold. This is a very specific kind of listening, for those long walks alone or sitting with a dark tale of an evening. Lorefrost is best experienced in solitude, where you can really lose yourself to a personal experience within its cold breath.

Lorefrost isn’t really a record of songs to delve into; it’s a mediation. You can lose yourself in its droning, or focus through into your own introspective contemplations. You might feel despair or comfort in its rustling, swaying meandering. There’s no hidden agenda, it’s simply a soundtrack to the inevitability of winter.

Rating: 7/10

Lorefrost is out now (digital) and set for release on cassette on December 29th via Fiadh Productions.

Follow SNOWSPIRE on Bandcamp.