Beats and yelling: Deathlike Dawn

A Monument I Shall Raise in Flame
Out 20^th March on Werewolf Promotion

Poland’s Deathlike Dawn continue the direction set by their previous album ‘Noc czarna czernią otchłani’, extending their tendrils further into semi-chromatic, dissonant territory for this latest release, sacrificing the hazy atmosphere coating 2024’s ‘Among the Graves of the Archetypes’ for a more stripped back, rigid sheen, giving full flower to the tightly crafting riffing. What they lose in character as a result of this process they attempt to make up for in the magnitude and arrangement of ideas, marshalling a huge quantity of raw materials into a dense array of technical black metal riffing.

The production is thin but intense. A full frontal assault of guitars makes up the centre piece. The distortion is aggressive but industry standard, a necessity given not only the intricacy of the riffs and chromatic through lines, but how frequently they range up and down the fretboard. Bass cuts through with vigour, linking up either with the flowing rhythmic passages or staccato lead material as they see fit. Despite this being decidedly non-linear in terms of structure and execution, the drums do what they can to maintain a sense of forward momentum. Fills and more off kilter patterns are delivered not to further disorientate, but more as a necessity of navigating these labyrinthine compositions. Raspy, mid-range vocals bring a welcome element of directness and primitivism, anchoring the music in the intellectual modesty of barbarism.

Whilst the main theme of each piece is usually relatively simple in and of itself, it is impatiently driven through a number of variations and mutated with accent phrases from the off, to the point that it feels like traversing over ever shifting sands. Certain chords or cadences are returned to with a frequency that demands the listener’s attention, but in the interim the music appears restless, impatient, almost indecisive. The fact that Deathlike Dawn have also shed any atmospheric ambition forces the listener into regarding this war of loosely melodic lines without distraction. There is no space left within the music for abstraction. Similar to Mefitis or Estonia’s Kõdu for the line it walks between dark and light, a non-comital, disconcerting sojourn through tonal and thematic ambiguity.

But Deathlike Dawn are perhaps more content than some of their peers to allow ideas to marinade for a time, albeit with the aid of generously applied developmental material, as in the second half of ‘Spirit of Blood and Storm’. The rhythm section fashions a jagged topography, a landscape mesmerising for its unknowable complexities, leaving the foregrounded lead segments to take on a more open ended, conversational temperament. These lines are melodic in the broadest definition of the term, but the arc of their narration is non-traditional, out of sequence, somehow not “of” the reality occupied by the listener.

In making more aggressive inroads into this purely chromatic, precision timed mechanistic frontier, Deathlike Dawn have lost something of their captivating splendour. The hypnotic, all encompassing immersion of an album like ‘Among the Graves of the Archetypes’, which displayed vestiges of a similar three dimensional riff interplay regardless, are somewhat missed in this more clinical incarnation. But as a work of dissonant black metal it stands apart for its ability to create clear if meandering statements of melodic intent. A project with much to offer the intellect even as it falls short in feeding the soul.