Poverty Metal

Henrik Palm's best known for his work in Ghost as one of the Nameless Ghouls, but since I was never a big Ghost fan, I picked Poverty Metal up because Svart billed it as "dark pop" and I was curious to see what they meant. What we get is a modern post-punk album with a few decent if mostly unmemorable tracks. It doesn't sound like Ghost or like a metal album, if anyone's expecting that -- but it's not terrible either. The guitars are big and blunt, the mostly-clean riffs echoing and curling at the edges with only a little overdrive -- there's a little bit of Killing Joke and maybe some Blue Oyster Cult influence in there. Atmospheres in the tracks move between echoing dreaminess and heavy, focused crunching. Sometimes it seems like Palm was trying so relentlessly to make a track eclectic and individual that it loses some of the sharpness it would otherwise have, but Nihilist is excellent -- and comes the closest to metal, except for perhaps Destroyer, a brooding hulk of asong that is heavy on the bass. The final track, Last Christmas, is slow and doomy, and this time is all instrumental; the languorous sound found on the rest of the album remains, however, even with out Palm's vocals. There are plenty of shots at heaviness here, and it has some menace to it and a few heavy chords, though it's not quite heavy enough for a metalhead's taste. While listenable, Poverty Metal probably isn't going to get more than a few spins this week. Too bad Palm didn't give us "Wealth Metal" instead.