Svalbard : "One Day All This Will End"

What will metal look like in a post- Deafheaven world? That is one question I found myself asking with this album.  These guys are a British band that is a little post-everything. The vocals are shouted in more of a hard core style and the punk in the drums points to the fact that might be where there hear is really at. While there are some more melodic moments, the opener is still more powerful than "Disparity" that follows. Really I am having trouble figuring out what is being done here that bands like Cave In and Converge haven't done better before. Sure there might be a slight more post rock in these guys guitar sound, but I'm not hearing blackened anything anywhere. Black metal is more of a feeling than a way to scream or a blast beat pattern. This is there debut album, which means one of two things, either they are still fine tuning who and what they are or this is culmination of years in the making.


They get a little more shoe gazey in places on "The Vanishing Point" point that doesn't make them Deafheaven. Then they take off in a more screamo direction.  They continue down this rowdy road for the brisk post- hard core pacing of "Expect Equal Respect". This is something I would have really dug in 2001, but my tastes have grown past this making these guys not seem all that heavy. Sure you can do a good hardcore jig to this and the riffs are catchier than most. "Unrequited" has a little more stomp but it feels like an extension of the previous song to me. The tremolo guitar that opens "the Damage Done" is much more interesting to me. While the song has a unruly punk propulsion it seems more honest than the song before it. "Unnatural Light" might have a more sonic attack to it's frantic jangle, but it is yet another moment where it sounds like I heave heard this all a decade before. They take a lighter more sonic post-rock meets shoe gaze tone on the closing song "Lily". This turns out to be an instrumental and its one of the better songs on the album so I am not sure what that says about the vocals. This album is decent just proves nothing is new under the sun and for young kids I am sure this is next level shit, I have heard it before and liked it better when Cave In did it so I'll give it a 6.