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| Album Score: 7.5/10 |
There are bands that try to be heavy, and then there are bands that just are. Svart Crown fall into the second category. The French foursome blend Death and Black metal in a tooth-rattling vortex, their sound falling somewhere between the crushing onslaught of Behemoth and the Sophisticated Black Metal Art of Emperor. Their second effort, Witnessing the Fall is largely driven by rumbling tremolo riffs and thunderous drumming, its ten songs tied together by themes of ancient Rome and “humanity in perdition”. While by no means the first to combine their two principle genres, Svart Crown – whose name translates to “Black Crown” and is pronounced as it looks – manage to create their own voice and vary their songwriting enough to make Witnessing worth hearing out.
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| Album Score: 6.5/10 |
One thing about The Seer is indisputable: this album is massive. Sprawling across 120 minutes and two discs, this behemoth is a radio DJ’s nightmare and a prog junkie’s dream. The songs range from a minute and a half to over half an hour, telling nigh-indecipherable tales of anguish and uprising, foresight and doom. Swans claim that The Seer is the culmination of 30 years of work, and the sheer scale of the album lives up to such a claim. And yet when it’s all said and done, the question remains: how much is too much?
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| Album Score: 8/10 |
Black metal and horror fiction would seem to be an obvious marriage of style and subject matter; on the other hand, concept albums have a propensity to be either exceptionally good or hilariously bad (take Swans and Metallica as recent examples). The Great Old Ones’ choice of H.P. Lovecraft’s Necronomicon as their template is a bold move, but it pays off in spades on Al Azif. Drawing from black metal stylistically and post-metal structurally, the French quintet manage to craft a captivating debut through a chilling atmosphere and unorthodox musicianship.
