Ultra Silvam - The Spearwound Salvation

Ultra Silvam are a Swedish trio I found on Bandcamp and checked out primarily due to the familiarity of their debut album’s cover, which appears to be done by the same artist or in the style of the artist who created Watain’s Sworn to the Dark. The Spearwound Salvation is, indeed, a debut album, and while the Swedes do capture the bare essence of their homeland’s black metal sound, there is still plenty of room for improvement upon what they show themselves to be capable of on this short debut full-length release.

The only real possible defining features of this album are the guitar passages and sometimes the bass lines when they decide to be, and while their relatively muddied mixing is indeed a part of their tapping into black metal’s earliest years, it drains the energy of their performances.

The opening title track rips through some apocalyptic high tremolo picking at its start, but the major scale chord progression it enters in its choruses of sort are a contrast that only comes across as goofy. Thankfully the second track, “Ödesalens uppenbarelse”, is a bit more direct at the stylistic level and less confusedly tampered with black metal cut even if there is still some tangible crust punk energy coming through. I enjoy the short funeral doom section it enters about midway through though.

“Birth of a Mountain” is a more gritty and straightforward black metal cut, but it kind of drags on unenthusiastically. The enthusiasm is picked up sharply, however, by the quick fierceness of “Förintelsens andeväsen”, which simply rides through two minutes of indulgent black metal blast beating. It’s this kind of energy I wish the band could better harness.

Across the filthy guitar tremolo picking of the carnal “Wings of Burial” and the speedy pummeling of “A Skull Full of Stars”, the band definitely channel that same primal energy that Watain so often taps into and it produces some of the album’s most enveloping results.

The six-minute closing track indeed traverses a good few musical sections to make for a more ambitious close to the album, and for the most part it’s well-arranged, but it doesn’t sound quite as dynamic as it could if it had been produced to better highlight its instrumental pieces.

Ultra Silvam seem torn between the intricate instrumentation of modern Swedish black metal and the hazy dark atmosphere of old-school black metal, and it seems like they would be best served by putting some more energy into crafting more unique instrumental parts and mixing them more clearly to get the most out of them, because it seems like they have that potential to channel the more powerful and instrumentally confident side of modern black metal.

Baby Watain/10