Vattnet Viskar - Sky Swallower (2013)

 

Country: U.S.A.
Genre: Black Metal
Style: Atmospheric Black Metal
Label Number: 9047-2
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© 2013 Century Media
Review by by Jayson Greene for Pitchfork.com

Vattnet Viskar's awe-inspiring, violently gorgeous first full-length, Sky Swallower, finds the New Hampshire metal band raging and mourning across massive sonic spaces. In a field where every choice of drum beat is loaded with specific, coded information, they pluck useful material from wherever they find it.

When Brandon Stosuy interviewed Chris Alfieri, co-founder and guitarist for the New Hampshire metal band Vattnet Viskar, last year, he asked what the band's name-- Swedish for "the water whispers"-- meant  to them. Alfieri's reponse was blunt: "Currently, I interpret our name to signify the environment's constant passive reminder that we're slowly destroying it." Alfieri also waxed lyrical about his home state, telling Stosuy that "New Hampshire is a land of contrast. Cold, bleak winters give way to hot, humid summers. The green leaves of spring burn red orange in the fall. You can see the ocean from the mountains." The reverence and the lyric note in his voice provide some insight into the band's awe-inspiring, violently gorgeous first full-length, Sky Swallower.

The album starts in the recognizable, misty-forest environs of early Scandinavian black metal: Opener "New Alchemy" bludgeons with the familiar all-sixteenths assault of guitars, drums, and bass, and the riff is a close harmonic cousin of Darkthrone's "Transilvanian Hunger". But after a few minutes of this locked spiral, the grip slackens, the drumming relaxes into eighth notes, then quarters, before the song yawns open into droning doom metal. By the end, "Alchemy" has receded further into glimmering, clean-toned guitar notes and lightly syncopated drum fills, and we're no  longer in any one place: Vattnet have already stormed across acres of territory. They rage and mourn across this massive open space for the next 32 minutes, and by the time the album has reached the regally chilly final track "Apex", you, too, can see the ocean from the mountains.

Like many other American metal bands (Inter Arma, Deafheaven, Woe, and Castevet, for example), Vattnet Viskar are stylistic nomads; in a field where every choice of drum beat is loaded with fiercely specific, coded information, they pluck useful stuff from wherever they find it. The middle-distance savagery of metalgaze, dour instrumental rock, the shuddering churn of doom metal-- Vattnet Viskar swallow it all, all usually within the space of the same song. The expansive power chords opening the short instrumental "Monarch" could be from Arkansas doom outfit Pallbearer, though when Nick Thornbury sings on the following track, "Breath of the Almighty, his voice is harsh and guttural and wet-sounding in a way more reminiscent of death than black metal-- you can hear individual spit bubbles pop and gurgle in back of his throat. The band's full attack has a similarly muscular ugliness to it, a visceral sound that can shrink suddenly pinhole-quiet.

In his Show No Mercy interview, Alfieri also talked about how hard the band thought about long-form structure-- peaks, dynamics, threading themes through a composition. This kind of under-the-hood point-plotting rarely sounds sexy, but you can feel it, even without an iota of musical training, coursing beneath Sky Swallower's 38 minutes, whispering beneath the roar. There are a few stunning moments on Sky Swallower when everything drops away: Midway through "Breath of the Almighty" for instance, the band dissipates after three or so minutes and nothing is left but two strings of guitar and a bass. The moment hangs, darkening, for several minutes, echoing a similar, earlier interlude in "Fog of Apathy". The last sound on the album is a lone acoustic, strumming two chords-- the lingering note of sadness, maybe that pulses beneath Sky Swallower, trailing off.

tags: vattnet viskar, sky swallower, 2013, flac,