Witnessing The Fall
If you consider the name of their label (Listenable Records) and the name of their hometown (Nice) you surely just can come to one conclusion: you should listen to it. They’re playing a mix of Black and Death Metal and that can be difficult, as we all know. Read here, if you want to know if our first impression (with the names) is the right one, or if the problems combining these genre were to big.
The four member formation did release one demo in 2006 and their debut album in 2008. In this years october they finally released their newest album Witnessing The Fall which we’re going to describe now.
First of all the postive aspects of their latest release: the production as well as the composition in general are really nice. Concerning the composition, you have to say that it combines both genres nearly flawlessly and sets accents as well and it gains much pressure with the high standard of production.
Paramount examples therefore are Nahash the Temptator and An Eternal Descent. While the first one demonstrates the power thats inherited in their compositions and how black metal riffs transform into death metal ones, the second one focuses more on the death metal elements of their style and therefore the tempo is slower, so that it comes to midtempo melodies. Brownie points of the composition are moments like the end of Nahash the Temptator, where the songstructure gets loosen and one riff is nearly as much celebrated as a soli, which combines with the vocals and thats making a really nice finale to the song.
Although An Eternal Descent is one of the examples for the positive aspects, but it can also demonstrate the flaws of the album. Although the combination of styles is good in general and the composition is interesting, there’s too much going on in the same moment and so the body of sound is overladen. If you won’t pay enough attention to the songs you could miss too much of the details, if you listen closely there is this danger of getting a headache. This stands for nearly the whole album, during the fact that they try to combine as much as possible out of two genres and that with full pressure, so that they try too much.
And in addition to that, you have to say that although the songs for themselves are good composed and vary enough to be interessting, if you’re listening to the whole album you might miss out the transitions to another song. So there’s a certain homogeneity in the album and that could lead to feelings of boredom if you’re going to listen to the record as a whole.
Conclusion:
Svart Crown convince with their skill concerning instrumentation and composition. The named problems are often found in black/death metal compositions, so that’s a kind of scourge and shouldn’t be taken as a k.o. creteria. If you like really extreme metal you should risk an ear, if you tend to get headaches easily you should think twice.
Rating: 75/100
Tracklist:
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