Black Death: Svart Crown’s Profane
A year or two ago, I decided that I needed to make sure all the music on my iPod was listed under the correct genre. But instead of the nerdy, autism-spectrum-grade fun of making a playlist, this just wound up being a pain in the fucking balls. Even beyond metal—with all its subgenre obsessed hair-splitting—it wound up giving me a headache before I gave up. How the hell do you tag The Beatles? What the hell do you call Hüsker Dü: hardcore, post-punk, “alternative,” or… what? John Zorn’s Xu Feng sure as shit isn’t jazz. Or is it? My inner hipster—the guy I drown out with my nu-metal teenage years and genuine adoration of the first Boston album—runs wild, making sure everything is labeled with the correct sub-sub-subgenre instead of being shoved under the big tent of something like black metal or shoegaze.
The reason I took this up was, shockingly, not because of an OCD need to have all my music compartmentalized, but because one sunny day when I was driving home, I wanted to listen to some classic rock. A bunch was missing though, so I didn’t hear any Zeppelin or the aforementioned Boston; just “Black Betty” and some Mountain. I wanted to be able to pull up some frosty scowling when I was in the mood for black metal, some insistent d-beat hardcore when I wanted to go for a run, some stoner rock if it was sunny and 2 or 3 bowls were a thing of the recent past. And Svart Crown fit into this wonderfully, as they’re a top-notch example of blackened death metal. The middle ground between DM ferocity and black metal ambience is well-inhabited by the French Earth-rapers, sewing violence into the cloth of melancholy introspection. If you want to hear this sort of thing and are sick of Behemoth, Svart Crown are your shit.
Not that the band are necessarily by-the-numbers; Profane, their latest, makes sure to nudge itself out beyond the constrictive boundaries of blackened death. Sharp, angular riffs razor through the noxious calm and burly death metal forward momentum. In addition to being indebted to the aforementioned Behemoth (as well as the dearly-departed Averse Sefira), Svart Crown are clearly fond of fellow warped countrymen Deathspell Omega. What’s interesting, however, is hearing the latter band’s trademark microbursts of grindcore-fast black metal and disjointed Sonic Youth-esque chords in the context of something thoroughly grounded. Though Svart Crown are happy to briefly wander out into the mist in the middle of “The Therapy of Flesh,” they make sure to bring it back around to a Hate Eternal-style frenzied tech-death riff that shifts into some blasting worthy of Marduk.
And the album’s best track—unsurprisingly, “In Utero: A Place of Hatred and Threat”; I mean, just look at that fucking title!—expertly crafts a rich, detailed, and unsettling journey into just over 5 minutes. While the rest of Profane (if you haven’t caught on to my feelings on it yet) is pretty fantastic, “In Utero” heightens everything just a little more. The juxtaposition between the thoroughly-metal weight of the riffs and the needling dissonance that often punctures them isn’t jarring, though. Both parts work well together, giving the considerable heaviness emotional resonance and the abstractions a sense of place and purpose. Profane’s a record both longhairs and sun-starved weirdos can enjoy in equal measure.
Profane’s greatest flaw, though, is that fucking album cover. Something this good does not deserve the C+ death metal castoff artwork it has. The The Grudge-style creepy eyes; the wrinkled flesh around the pregnant belly; the uneven, clearly fake tits (seriously, has pornography corrupted us this much as a culture: that imaginary boobs have to look rock-hard and unrealistic???); the faux-artsiness of the black-and-white sketching… In what way does this help the album? In what way does it hint at the excellent, grim brutality contained within? Soon I’ll go through my iPod making sure everything has the proper artwork, and for Svart Crown’s Profane—one that’ll surely be staying on there—I’ll include the cover of Supertramp’s Breakfast in America, a comparatively better album cover that does just as good a job at evoking blackened death metal within than the castoff small-time porn star impregnated by The Devil does.
…anyway, Profane’s pretty great.
Svart Crown’s Profane is out now on Listenable. You can stream the song the entire album here and purchase the album here
