Dimwind & Breaths - Seasons

EP Name: Seasons

Artists: Dimwind & Breaths

Released: April 2022

Label: Trepanation Recordings (UK)

Rating: 7/10

Artwork by Christian Hang

Tracklist

Dimwind - Window Passed
Breaths - When Soft Voices Die (Ft. Chad Kapper of Frontierer)

American blackgaze artist Breaths and Swedish post-metal duo Dimwind have teamed up to create the atmospheric joint EP that is 'Seasons'. A project that serves as a reminder that even with everything going on in the world we can't lose sight of humanity's abuse to the planet. Breaths is the creation of multi-instrumentalist and songwriter Jason Roberts. The debut album from Breaths 'Lined in Silver' was released during the pandemic and was shorty followed by sophomore album 'Though Life...' which was put out early 2022. Breaths combines a lot of sounds such as; post-metal, black metal, doom metal, shoegaze, post-rock, prog metal and post-hardcore to create this unique sound that was really what intrigued me about them when I first heard 'Lined in Silver' and is the reason I've stuck around. Dimwind is a duo from Sweden consisting of Andreas Hansen (Strings & Keys) and Jonas Eriksson (Drums). The two have played together in various projects since the late 90's and formed the duo that is Dimwind in 2019. Their vision is to create heavy emotive post-metal that blurs the borders to adjacent genres. Debut album 'Slow Wave Violence' saw Dimwind get critical acclaim and they are now working towards their sophomore album. When I first looked at this new EP 'Seasons' I was intrigued to see that it only featured two songs but quickly learned that each track is about fourteen/fifteen minutes long allowing each artist to show off their creativity in one piece. 'Seasons' focuses on the destruction that the human race has done to the planet and this is obvious from the very beginning with the advert like introduction. As soon as the guitar comes in the whole track takes on this heavy presence very much feeling like you could be heading into some kind of war. 'Seasons' asks the question 'Can we reverse the destruction?' and first track 'Window Passed' from Dimwind gives you time to think about the question at hand as you listen to the atmospheric instrumental piece that surrounds you. I love how in this first track you can almost feel the drums attacking and the occasional pace change keeps 'Window Passed' interesting to listen to. Second track 'When Soft Voices Die' comes from Breaths and features Chad Kapper of Frontierer. This one comes in feeling much heavier than the previous giving the listener an intriguing change of pace. Much like the previous song this one also has this sort of battle/war like sound to it though. I think I've said this about Breaths before but there's definitely this Deftones type vibe in there especially when 'When Soft Voices Die' calms down and goes into this more chilled out atmospheric moment, but the song doesn't stay that way for long and leads you full circle back to the heavy and back again before finishing. Overall I found this to be a really interesting EP. The concept of doing a split EP isn't something I have personally seen before and too be honest these two bands sounds blend really well together. Having known of Breaths for a while I do have to say however that this is probably not my favourite thing I have ever heard from them but as a whole 'Seasons' is a really nice listen. Normally having tracks that are around fifteen minutes long can be a daunting to me as a listener but it really didn't feel that way when I was listening and instead was more like listening to a whole story and I think this is one if you have the time to just sit down and take it in, give it a listen.