Urfaust

France has been spewing out a lot of raw grim black metal bands in recent years and S.V.E.S.T. is no exception. Engulfing their blasphemous music with an extremely heavy load of static makes this ones of the rawest recordings I have heard. Surprisingly it is even rawer than the demos. The static sounds fairly artificial but unusually this doesn’t detract from the overall effect. Static often raises alarm bells for me as most of the bands that use a lot are crappy amateur bands who should never have even released their fischer price recorded shit, even if they are only limited to about 50 copies or only handed out to friends.

The band that springs mostly to mind is Mayhem back when they didn’t suck with releases such as Out from the Dark and Live in Leipzig. This is especially the case with Epitaphe which uses a riff that is very similar to the backbone riff of Necrolust. This is one of the only occasions where S.V.E.S.T. sound more in the vein of the first wave of black metal.

The lead guitarist is very talented and uses a shit load of breakneck speed tremolo picking resulting in the chaotic nature. He often plays much in the style of Euronymous. The drums plod along at mid pace and there is very little emphasis on them as with many black metal bands. The bass is heavily distorted and mostly results in more static. The vocalist uses mid ranged raspy screams with very little variation but who cares the vocals rule.

The album moves in and out between melancholy and chaos and the overall effect is one that is very grim and relatively epic. Unusual to most of black metal S.V.E.S.T. often build up the intensity until breaking point and then release it and you are wondering where the climax has gone, being similar to what many of the bands in the doom genre do. Around 10minutes into Putrefiance Redemptrice the band do reach climax and the guitarist drops some jaw dropping tremolo picking.

So overall it is nice to hear a band playing more in the vein of early Scandinavian black metal as opposed to the overproduced shit and the stupid teenagers who should never have picked up an instrument in their life that plague the scene today.