Violet Cold Goes Completely "kOsmik" on Latest Full-Length

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If you want your soul to be smashed to smithereens in the best way possible, a good place to start is with post-metal. For Azerbaijan’s Violet Cold, bright, steadily building riffs were not enough, so he took matters several steps further. By building on the best of what new-school metal has to offer with ethereal samples and spacey beats, Violet Cold is a part of an experimental movement whose significance might not yet be completely comprehensible. While the legacy being constructed in front of our very eyes remains to be fully known, what is clear is that it feels damn good. The atmosphere that is maintained through Violet Cold’s recent surprise Valentine’s Day release kOsmik breathes life into everything it touches, lifting you up to a higher plane where you can survey scenes that are the subject of paralyzing nostalgia.

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The brainchild of Emin Guliyev, Violet Cold is no stranger to treading into uncharted waters. His last full-length Anomie (2017) made its viral rounds through the underground after release, with many listeners discussing the composition in a manner that diverges from most metal reviews. Beautiful, stunning, brilliant – it was almost as if fans were adjudicating a sunset or skyline from an ideal vantage point. Anomie is simply a story that is better felt and not told, perhaps in part because it is difficult to identify all the moving pieces simultaneously; rather, they run together smoothly as the sum of their parts. True to the name “anomie,” referring to a sense of normlessness, Violet Cold temporarily removes the listener from the wheels and cogs of the everyday.

Notably, Guiyev did not rest between the release of Anomie and kOsmik. The Sommermorgen trilogy — Innocence, Joy, and Nostalgia — left its mark on 2018 with two hours of blissful meanderings. Mounting guitar gracefully transitions into piano strokes and somber violin, making for a seamless journey to and from each installment. The artwork for the collection consists of three similar patterns of obscured roses of different hues, reflecting a warm contrast from the greyscales to which heavy music fans are accustomed. The brighter point of view is no doubt refreshing, but it still manages to retain an earnest tone that would otherwise be lost in the color of an insubstantial pop album.

With kOsmik, the ropes have been pulled together in a particularly effective fashion. With perhaps the best balance of heavy and light to date, Violet Cold incorporates futuristic radio transmissions, traditional Azerbaijani music, and rhythmic jazz experiments into the strides of blast beats and post-hardcore-style vocals. Hypnotic and devastating, kOsmik holds the potential to appeal to a wide audience; while post-metal is certainly not everyone’s cup of tea, it would be unfair to place Violet Cold into such a box. While such influences appear to be kOsmik’s jumping point, enjoying it as its own cohesive recipe makes for the ideal conditions for consumption. The visuals for the album have returned to the dark side, too — the way the layered geometric shapes compliment the forest’s blacked-out silhouette speaks to two different schools of metal, one of post-rock modernity and another of blackened atmospheric antiquity.

As their apexes overlap, we find ourselves on the receiving end of the new and novel kOsmik.

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Follow Violet Cold on Facebook. kOsmik is out now on Bandcamp

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