I was aware of Behemoth from pretty early on but don’t really remember this album coming out. To be honest the cover is very stock standard Black Metal and there’s nothing about it that would pull me away from listening to the other black metal band I was into at the time to give time to this. BEHEMOTH Sventevith (Storming Near the Baltic) is the bands debut album from 1994. There was a lot of Black Metal coming out of Europe at this time and myself still being a teenager at the time didn’t have the financial rescources to keep up with all of it. Thats not to say it’s a bad record or there’s anything wrong with it, there isn’t, its a pretty good record, but it didn’t really make it onto my radar.
Going back through youtube archives is a glorious thing to find out where bands started and to learn a lot about their early history. This is no exception. This is not the greatest album ever recorded by any stretch, but it’s better than a lot of the horse shit that European Black Metal descended into around this time. After the debut albums by Cradle of Filth, and then when Dark Throne went B Grade Black metal the doors were opened for a flood of wanna be black metal bands to take to their 4-track recorders and re-create the late 1980s scene and use “Necro” producution as an excuse for sounding shitty. This does fit into that pure underground black metal asthetic, but for a new band this is honestly pretty cool.
The songs have some blasting black metal moments similar to Dark Throne or Marduk and they also have some more melodic moments similar to maybe Dimmu Borgir or something. This is not the Behemoth we know and love today but its an embryoonic version of the band. A young band that musically still stood head and shoulders above what I’d call the “Third Wave of Black Metal”. At this point I would say that Behemoth aren’t doing anything original in any sense of the word, but they’re doing it well. They would have got some great opening slots from from some of the major players and putting on a good and brutal prerformance would have earned them some respect and the ability to take their craft to the next level.
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