LP Review: "It's Hard To Have Hope" by Svalbard

It's Hard To Have Hope

It's becoming a mission of mine to get my daughter into eating Asian foods of some variety. I've gotten her to agree to try a Chinese Buffet.

It's not my personal favorite Asian food, but one of my all time great loves is Chinese food. Honestly, I'm not as well versed in the authentic fare as I should be, but the stuff they serve in restaurants here is a really wonderful thing.

To the best of my knowledge we don't have any Vietnamese, Thai, or Japanese buffets here in St. Louis. My daughter is horribly picky and eats with her eyes, so a buffet is necessary so she can try each thing.

Buffet restaurants are interesting things. Say what you want, but as a parent to a picky child eater and the husband to a very picky eater, they're kind of a godsend....

Svalbard

The fun buffets...you don't know what's going to be there when you arrive.

Like, have you ever had salisbury steak at a pizza buffet?

I have!

Svalbard reminds me a lot of that salisbury steak eaten at the pizza buffet.

To begin with, their name leads me to think that they're Swedish or Finnish, but they're from the UK.

The first tracks make me think they're straight black metal, but what they are is anybody's guess really. It's Hard To Have Hope reminds me a lot of the world we live in today.

There's no part of this album that sounds like, oh yeah, that's precisely normal and what I expected to happen. That's kind of something never said after reading the day's news in 2018 is it?

Honestly, my review is a lot like this album. There's a lot of great bits that even though they have nothing to do with each other, it adds up to an enjoyable experience. (At least I hope you enjoyed reading this!)

It's Hard To Have Hope is difficult to describe and Svalbard is even harder to pigeon hole. That's probably why I spent 30 words talking about salisbury steak.

In the mean time, preorder this record today.

Release: 5/25/18
Genre: Post Metal
Label: Translation Loss Records
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