Svarta Stugan
Islands/Öar

Sometimes those Christmas gifts you never got show up in the playlist, like this album by Swedish band Svarta Stugan. Their name translates to The Black Cottage if you want to do such a thing; the album name is already translated for you. As you might understand from the title, it is an adventure to some islands, öar if you are speaking Swedish. This is the first album by the band, they have some EPs and a release collecting these EPs in one, but this is the first album. And I would have to say that it looks pretty cool and exciting from the cover art, and that illustrates pretty well what the album has to offer.

Post-rock is one way to describe it, both I and the press release also think that the music can be compared with stuff by composers like Badalamenti or Morricone. Pretty dramatic and relatively fresh I think, good production and great atmospheres. It is an album that takes you on an adventure and it probably would have worked rather well as a soundtrack to some moving pictures, or as a soundtrack to a story that you make yourself – that would be one hell of an adventure. And I should add that a good thing is that they keep the playing time sensible as well not drawing it out in endless and pointless things, the seven tracks on this album requires about forty minutes of your time and that is something you would gladly give it.

It is perhaps the perfect soundtrack for the time you are sitting in that black cottage in the woods somewhere reading an exciting book of some kind. It is a strong album that is well worth playing through, sometimes I have even played it a few times in a row as I have found it to be quite enjoyable. It is like that adventure in the mind visiting some islands with different landscapes and different climates, very exciting and it is fun to actually hear a new album that actually offers the sense of novelty and not just a derivative of something else.

The black cabin is most certainly worth visiting, especially if you like the post-rock stuff, the instrumental stuff, or just likes music of movie adventures. It is great stuff and I think that you cannot go wrong with an album like this, so why don’t you check it out already?

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