SVANGUR KVÖL — Wreck of the World (review)

SVANGUR KVÖL — Wreck of the World album cover

Album · 2017 · Black Metal

1/5 · 2017-02-28
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A one man black metal act out of Australia, Svangur Kvöl is the project of one Guðmundr. A couple of EP's, a demo and a single were released during 2016, but Wreck of the World (2017) is the project's first actual album. Despite carrying that branding, Wreck of the World isn't actually all that long. It's six tracks spread across a dead twenty-seven minutes. The prior EP release Mourn (2016) wasn't all that shorter at almost eighteen and a half minutes long with half the amount of tracks.

The material found within initially shows itself to be of the ilk of rough and raw black metal that has been done a thousand or more times and counting by this point in the genre's history. A passage of ambience is heard at the end of opener Out Of The Darkness... The Wolves Came Whispering, with an electronic sounding beat added to it, but the album doesn't seem to offer much else on first listen that hordes of others aren't also doing. Scratching the surface by persevering with the album reveals that there's a bit more to it than that, such as leanings into the depressive black metal sub-genre, some death metal and even a little bit of punk. The reason I didn't pick up on any of that the first time around is that, as I pointed out: it's rough and it's raw. Even by black metal standards the recording quality of Wreck of the World seems to be more like demo level, with fourth track Fences and Windows going so far as to cut off so abruptly it actually gives the impression that part of the track is missing opposed to an intentional sudden stop.

The music does have a much more chunky sound production than is typically heard from black metal acts (they usually go for something a whole lot more cold sounding), so it does have that small different factor going for it, but that's about it. The different ideas are there but the flavour they add is small because those details aren't too easily picked up upon, making it very easy for the release to be dismissed out of hand. Overall it's simply one of those releases where you can hear the potential if you go looking for it but can't take much actual pleasure out of through listening to it.

Svangur Kvöl is a fairly new act and like many in the genre (or metal in general) Guðmundr is working without the backing of a label and releasing his music for free/donation so is probably just doing the best that he can with what he's got. Unfortunately the results he's come up with for Wreck of the World show that he's still got a lot to learn before he produces something worth going back to. For me the album served the purpose of discovering the name Svangur Kvöl and that there is potential to be found within this first album, so the name will be in the back of my mind should I run across the project again in the future, but that's a common story I find myself reliving with a lot of artists in similar situations and the chances are even if that does happen I won't remember too much about this album at that stage.