Savium

Osculum, Basium, Savium
(demo-cd, Savium, 2005)

"I am a one man band who's gotten tired of playing in bands. I live an existence very similar to Gollum - i.e. I'm just recording instrumental rock in my cave." That's how Savium, the guitarist and composer Claus Hansen from Randers introduces himself on the press sheet to the CD-R release Osculum, Basium, Savium - and somewhere it is heard very clearly on the nine tracks, who surely aims for a band dynamic, but is led to be created through a too transparent digital orchestration. Which is not an unconditional plus when you play a form of music which puts itself a place between metal and post-rock genres - styles who thrives on the interaction. But one should not butcher the outcome entirely on that ground, for as it is, there are plenty of interesting stuff at stake in Savium's music.

Actually the music on Osculum, Basium, Savium , which is meant as a more gloomy and energetic deviator from a normally more humoristic and trippy course, reminds yours truly a great deal of the radical mixture of pounding metal, electronic programming, weird interjections and jazzy elements which extremely overlooked Konk created in the early 90's. They too worked in a long instrumental and complex course, where the metal love for guitar show-off was placed in such interesting and colourful scenes, that it actually became a plus. And if there is something this CD-R is a display of it is guitar show-off in different tempos, different tone levels, and with a countless number of different effects. But also very interesting guitar show-off where some nuances really shines through - because if the main sound is metallic, there is also played jazzy, lyrically, and even acoustically while the background, which from one moment can be found in a chanting level, to in the next moment be turned into a brutal break or a surprising jazzy excursion, it does its best to lead the six stringed astray.

An interesting strategy which - when it works - results in brilliant tracks such as "Animus Girl" and "Evading My Resurrection". Here the constant musical progressions reaches something marked and emphasized, which could be interesting to hear Savium work more on. But unfortunately the guitar is led so much astray that the impression becomes unstructured. Something the creator clearly isn't deaf towards, since he uses the very word "unstructured" about these recordings on the remitted press sheet. And is it in fact wrong that something is unstructured? No, not necessarily - but for a music, which on the face of it seems tight and ambitious, how weird and twisted it might be, it nevertheless seems slightly disturbing. To this pair of ears anyway. To another set of ears it might be, to be fair, something completely different.

Osculum, Basium, Savium is foremost a nice little business card from a guitarist with lots of phantasm and strange ideas. And one hides it too. But if Gollum is to come out of the cave, it wouldn't harm to have a complete orchestra and a slightly tighter compositional grip.

Reviewed by:
Steffen B. Pedersen

Translated by:
Claus M. Hansen

Publishing info:
Published at Geiger.dk 02-11-2006