Bandcamp Call this an album and you are already slightly wrong. Unwander is, in the project’s own words, a collection of the tracks released over the past three years, three of which exist because people sent money. It is sixty seven minutes long, it has five pieces on it, and the shortest runs nine and three quarter minutes.
Until Death Overtakes Me is one person, credited as SVC, working out of Erembodegem in East Flanders. The project started in 1999, stopped in 2011, and came back in 2016. This comes out on Nulll Records under a Creative Commons licence, and there is no Instagram account anywhere, which I mention because it took a while to establish and because it reads as a decision rather than an oversight.
A compilation that does not sound like one
Here is the part I did not expect. Tracks assembled from a three year span usually give themselves away: different rooms, different gear, different ideas about how loud things should be. These do not. Across all five the tonal picture is almost identical, the treble content stays within a few percentage points, and the average levels sit inside one and a half decibels of each other.
Whether that is a compliment depends on what you want from this music. It means the collection coheres, and it also means SVC has been making the same record for three years, which for funeral doom is arguably the point rather than a criticism.
What is not in doubt is how dark it is. Almost nothing lives above five kilohertz here, between three and six percent depending on the track, and well over half of everything sits in the midrange. There are no cymbals cutting through, no air, no sparkle. If you have been told funeral doom is heavy, this is the version where heavy means dense rather than loud.
The two that move
“Unearth” and “Unwander” are the pieces worth starting with. They open the widest distance between their quiet and loud passages on the record, and “Unearth” is also the darkest thing here and, by my ear, instrumental: no voice at all, the weight carried by guitar themes and something choral sitting far behind them. Thirteen minutes that get where they are going without ever raising their voice.
“Unbound” is the opposite and the hardest work. Thirteen minutes holding the narrowest range on the album, building tension through layering and decay rather than through any change in level. It is the most committed thing here and the one most likely to lose you.
So
Good, with a caveat that is simply about size. Sixty seven minutes of this is a serious ask, and the band call it a collection rather than an album, so somebody arriving cold is better served by one track than by all five. What you get in return is unusually consistent: a project that since 1999, with a five year silence in the middle of it, has refused to speed up, brighten, shorten or sell itself, and a set of pieces made years apart that hold together as though they were not. Start with “Unearth”. If thirteen minutes of that works on you, the other fifty four will.
For a collection assembled from three years of separate releases, the consistency is the striking thing. Average levels run -13.3 to -14.9 decibels across all five tracks, peak-to-average distances 13.0 to 14.5, and the midrange carries between 52.5 and 62.6 percent of total energy throughout. Treble above five kilohertz sits between 3.1 and 6.0 percent, which is extraordinarily dark even by the standards of this music and the single clearest number on the record. Tonal centres run 1456 to 1929 hertz, with “Unearth” lowest at 1456 and carrying the most low end at 26.7 percent. The dynamics are where the tracks separate: “Unearth” opens 16.4 decibels and “Unwander” 15.7, while “Unbound” holds 6.7 across thirteen minutes. Nothing has been compressed into a wall, which given the density is a decision worth noting.
Standout tracks: Unearth, Unwander, Undream
