Svin - Svin - Review

Svin - Svin

by Erick Mertz

published: 21 / 5 / 2015

Label: Pony Records
Format: CD

Disorientating self-titled album from Danish rock and jazz avant-garde experimentalists, Svin

Review

You can look at Svin’s self-titled album one of two ways. Either it’s a melancholic, chaotic mess of horns and guitars, or it’s a brilliant hotchpotch of experimental jazz. The Danish band’s debut, 'Heimat', came out in 2008, and since then they have steadily built global recognition for their risk taking. 'Svin' is no different, a staggering array of bold sound into each of the six tracks, percussion crashes, oriental guitar lines and blaring trumpets exploding in the mix. What I’m describing sounds disorienting, and it certainly feels that way, taken on the nose. Taken in deep, however, its affect is as wonderfully arresting as anything I’ve come across in recent days. The quartet is adept at crafting deep, lasting mood. I was all over the map, traveling further internally than I could adequately remark, from spectral, fantasy battlefields on 'Maharja' and 'Arktis' to the grim, pre-dawn reflections of 'Alt' which belongs as exit music for the saddest movie ever made. Something so brief has no business being this intense, yet 'Svin' never relents. Driving to the album’s too soon end is the sparse, open-ended 'Fede Piger', a culmination for their keen sense of improvisation. The song opens wide with a quiet, spare middle section quiet before erupting into nothing. Contrivance isn’t a word to describe 'Svin'. Find the antonym for that word and you’re onto something. Heart rending. Singular. Recanting the opening statement. 'Svin' isn’t an either/or proposition. It is delightfully, sadly and beautifully both.