Weekly album: Behemoth - Sventevith

Behemoth - Sventevith

1995 / Black metal

1. Chant of the Eastern Lands

2. The Touch of Nya

3. From the Pagan Vastlands

4. Hidden in a Fog

5. Ancient

6. Entering the Faustian Soul

7. Forgotten Cult of Aldaron

8. Wolves Guard My Coffin

9. Hell Dwells in Ice

10. Transylvanian Forest

btcarey: This Weekly Album takes us backs to the roots of Blackened Death Metal giants, Behemoth. Behemoth’s sound has famously evolved throughout their career, with each new release featuring distinct, thematic and stylistic differences than the prior. This evolution matched with the bands production consistency has spawned an impressive discography, producing classic albums for the past 20 years. Unfortunately, due to this vast catalog of outstanding records, their earlier material is all too often overlooked, being a huge mistake for fans of Behemoth and extreme metal.

Behemoth’s grim roots are buried deep in the murky soil of the pagan vastlands. “Sventevith (Storming Around the Baltic)” is a true work of dark art. The album encompasses a multitude of stylistic traits from all walks of black metal, blending them seamlessly together to create a masterpiece. Sventevith’s production is raw and cold, with hollow drums, and guitars so distorted they barely provide a fuzzy growl. This freezing, desolate sound is ironically paired with beautiful keyboard melodies and tender acoustic guitar accompaniments, providing the perfect recipe for pagan black metal. In the midst of all the powerful black metal songs there are several peaceful interlude tracks that add a majestic depth to the overall ambiance. My favorite of these amicable interludes is “Hell Dwells in Ice”. It takes the listener on cool, soothing, walk through an autumn forest, the last temperate night before the cold winds of winter stricken the land (which is achieved by following track “Transylvanian Forrest”).

As one of my personal favorite black metal albums, I would recommend “Sventevith (Storming Around the Baltic)” to Behemoth enthusiasts, black metal fans, and basically anyone who appreciates good music. This album has been overlooked and underrated for far too long!!

Favorite Tracks:

-From the Pagan Vastlands

-Hidden in Fog

-Entering the Faustian Soul

-Wolves Guard My Coffin

Orostider: Behemoth is now known for its efforts to make blackened death metal more visible in mainstream and their style of blackened death metal, which is a lot easier to listen to than some other blackened death metal bands or the pioneers of the genre. Behemoth is to blackened death metal what Dimmu Borgir is to black metal, even though Behemoth's modern era releases aren't as utterly awful as Dimmu's. Due to their status as a gateway band, Behemoth has received quite a lot of unjustified hatred. I myself admit to just dislike their modern era overly clean production style. Luckily, 'Sventevith' isn't even close to Behemoth's modern era material and offers a black metal album with the sweet distinctive production quality of the 90's. 

'Sventevith' represents the same variation of black metal as Satyricon did in the mid-nineties. Both of the bands' releases were melodic black metal with eerie reverbs everywhere. Even though comparing 'Sventevith' to Satyricon's classic releases is pretty unfair, the reason why 'Sventevith' didn't achieve the same kind of status of a classic album is clear. The album is overall just mediocre. 

Behemoth managed to utilize some creative elements, like the pretty strong presence of neofolk influences and the layered guitar parts with both electric and acoustic guitar being audible at the same time. The neofolk influences were one of the best things of the album, but occasionally they, in my opinion, sounded a bit too cheery. The dungeon synth elements were quite refreshing too, but I would have preferred them separated from the rest of the songs for some reason.

All in all, 'Sventevith' is a solid 90's black metal album and although it can't be compared to the classic's of the era, it offers enough variation to last several more spins. I might have to get familiar with the early Behemoth releases now. 

tp5170: There was a time when I used to listen to Behemoth quite regularly, but at some point I simply moved onwards and forgot the band for the most part. For my mistake I never ended up checking out the first albums of the band, as now it turns out that ‘Sventevith’ is actually rather good.

Being released around that time, the album has that nice 90’s black metal vibe to it and the production values of the album are just on the right level, at for me. The sound is hollow and gloomy, - not too clean but not overly distorted either, and it works well with whole shady pagan black metal theme.

The implementation of acoustic guitar on the album is also surprisingly good and they really managed to do it in a way that feels really natural and really bumps up the general atmosphere and shoves it to a more melancholic direction.

I have simply been having a blast with the album and as far as I am concerned I am an idiot for not checking out the album earlier.

Kattroll: I have to admit that when I heard that this week's pick is Behemoth, I wasn't really glad. Although the band itself isn't familiar to me, I can't help but imagine a bald metal head wearing combat trousers and Dimmu Borgir shirt. Dimmu and Behemoth sort of fall into the same category: easier and more melodic style of black metal. Some people could call me purist now, and I might be a bit of a purist, but the fact is that I usually enjoy the rawer style of the genre.

'Sventevith' was a positive surprise, because the album happened to be Behemoth's debut album from the 1995 and the sounds were as they usually were at that time: crude and hollow. Another surprise was the amount of dungeon synth elements the album had. From time to time I was certain I felt some knight vibes. This is one hell of a medieval castle. 

The album could require a certain mood to listen to for it to open up better than how it did during these two spins. 'Sventevith' wasn't a bad album at all. Vice versa, it was occasionally even rather enjoyable, even if it didn't convince me entirely. Pretty fun stuff to listen to and I wouldn't mind if someone played this album somewhere, even if I wouldn't necessarily do so myself.