It's second album in for these fairly orthodox Norwegians. Apart from the death flavour around the edges of the sound, some latter period Emperor driving those wind blasted beats, the sound is as Black Metal middle ground as it gets on first spin: Aggressive without losing a sense of grim melody, mid-paced and very Norwegian.
Opening track ' Breathing Soil', though has a good bit of the Sargeist approach to the melody, riding a freezing riff and is not just an excellent song but leaves me optimistic for the rest of the album. Obviously this shows that they have the right moves so it's just down to what they choose to do with them.
However the follow up 'Hellig Jord' finds them sliding sideways into that cold wasteland of Blizzard Beasts death metal influence. Whereas there is nothing wrong with this approach in principle, the reality too often finds itself lost and going in ever decreasing circles where the only things to grab hold of are the old, familiar landmarks. So by the time we reach ' Aroused Self Extinction' I'm grasping for the old Emperor and Immortal-isms in the death flavoured flurries simply for some feature in a landscape that leaves me disappointingly flat. Nothing bad, but simply nothing to remember anything by and hardly my favourite period Immortal to revisit either.
'I Am The Path, part II' re-introduces a touch of that catchy first song style but by the next song we're back to those familiar and repetitive chord progressions.
Unmasked Violation Of Life, thankfully stirs the storm a little better with an undulating structure and some vocal variations and turns of pace to hint at what else the band could be capable of should they choose to release their grip on the over used death metal blast.
The rest of the album slides away from me again, though. With a relatively standard pace and structure throughout the majority of songs, the album ends up trailing away rather than breaking into whatever Ultimate was the goal, I feel.
So, nothing wrong here, simply competent but ultimately failing to grab my attention as much as it should. It merely reminded me how much I love Anthems To The Welkin At Dusk, and made me realise the far reaching influence of both that and Blizzard Beasts even on bands today.
Still, the high points here do firmly indicate that Svarttjern are capable of much more. This is only their second full length after all so perhaps they need to simply strike out on their own a little more, confident that they are walking on solid musical ground.
http://www.myspace.com/svarttjern
Gizmo
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