Premiere: Let Winter linger a bit with Svneatr’s “Crimson Star”
Baby it’s cold outside.
I don’t know about your part of the world, but where I’m at, even though the sun started to show its face, we’re still close to freezing temperatures. What music goes well with that? Black metal, of course. But what if instead of the ol’ “grim and frostbitten” kind of cold, you wanna listen to a band that manages to convey the feeling in a different, more interesting way? Well in that case, we got you covered, because today, we are able to present you with the premiere of Svneatr‘s “Crimson Star” off their forthcoming debut, The Howl, The Whisper, The Hunt.
As you can see, this is quite far from the blast-beating, tremolo-riffing, snowstormy, second-wave type of cold. This is the type of cold that creeps up on you and slowly seeps into every crevice; it’s no less deadly in the end, though. The drums are punchy and up front in the mix, sounding like the perilous cracking of the ice on the lake you foolishly decided to venture out onto. The caustic vocals resemble the air on a mean winter morning, the kind of air that stings in your nose and makes it feel like your head is being gripped by an ice-cold vice. The guitars lure you into that false sense of security where you think a light jacket might be enough, only to find that even your underwear is frozen stiff before you’ve made it to the bus stop.
To top it all off, the somewhat oddball approach to songwriting keeps you on your toes, reminding you that despite the occasional ray of sunshine, devastation by frost is still a very real possibility. Everything consequently sticks to the mid-tempo range, giving Svneatr ample opportunity for unexpected time and tempo changes and little flourishes of detail (especially on the drums) that round out the experience. What intrigues me about it all is that despite a comparably minimalistic sound, they manage to come off just as off-kilter and unsettling as some grand-scale, dissonant European black metal outfits – if they want to, that is. Most of the time they do seem to want to, but in the course of the album, Svneatr also prove that they can switch it up and even sound – dare I say it – warm at times.
Overall though, it’s a somewhat creepy, somewhat alien, somewhat uneasy affair that’s bound to please fans of general weirdness.
The Howl, The Whisper, The Hunt will be released independently on March 16th. It’s up for pre-order over at their Bandcamp, where you can also listen to “The Hunt”. Perhaps head over to Facebook as well to find out when Svneatr will be slowly killing a town near you.
