Metal Storm logo
Mourning Dawn - Mourning Dawn review




Bandcamp music player
Reviewer:
8.6

9 users:
7
Band: Mourning Dawn
Album: Mourning Dawn
Release date: January 2007


01. Intro
02. ...From The Torrent And The Fountain
03. Grey Flood
04. Interlude
05. When The Sky Seems To Be A Flag
06. Innocence Leaves
07. As The Ocean...
08. Verdun

Mourning Dawn hail from France, a country with a pretty strong doom metal scene that becomes more and more populated as years pass by and with the rise of the population the quality standards remain high, something worth-mentioning and hopeful (no matter how contradictive this word may sound when it comes to doom metal) for the future of the scene. The birth of 2007 found them with their debut album, the self-titled masterpiece of sorrow, a release that will manage to pin your defences to the ground with its oblivious, sinister and distressing sound.

"Mourning Dawn" consists of 8 compositions and it's limited to a 1000 copies, so if you're interested in some ground-shaking doom/black metal you'd better hurry, it is not only a collector's item, but also an emblem embodied on the mirror of suicide, unfolding scarlet reflections of self-torment in the darkening atmosphere. Laurent, the main man behind the band, seems to have dwelled for a long time in the corridors of oppression and bands like Deinonychus, Bethlehem, Xasthur, first period Katatonia and Forgotten Tomb and managed to blend together the most fabulous elements of all these bands in the most unerring and expressive way, adorning them with scars through his personal musical prism.

Laurent and Fabien offer some afflicted guitar work that never fails to dominate all traces of love, hope and other beautiful emotions, withering them to pieces. The quality of the guitar work is by far above the average in the scene, something worth-mentioning, with the riffing, the solos and the acoustic passages being always atmosphere-evoking, an important factor in this very musical genre. The guitars at times sound threatening and menacing, at others heart-rending and mourning and there are moments when they burst with anger, devastating all peace and innocense. While listening to "Mourning Dawn" you'll witness guitar sounds and FX familiar to you, with the most vivid ones being from Xasthur, when they have this gloomy and misty bereaving feeling, Deinonychus, when they are more intense and surrounding, and Shining/Forgotten Tomb, when the aesthetic becomes more black metal oriented. If the first half of the atmosphere owes its existence in the guitar sound (and the floating distinctive keyboard melodies that lie in the background at times - also, some passages in the beginning or the end of some songs, or somewhere inbetween, with obscure piano etc melodies add another sense to the songs), then the other half revives from the ominous throat of Laurent. Whether he screams in utter pain and despair, recites in an emotionless and cold way or grunts in full rage and torment he sounds unerring, stunning, doleful and morbid, evoking the grandeur of mourning through his vocal projections that darken the horizon in the most heart-rending way! As for the rhythm section, the bass lines are hiding somewhere a little bit behind the desolate walls of sound created by the razorblade guitar riffing (but that's not a problem anyway, it's underground doom metal we're talking about), whereas the drumming interprets its role pretty well, lending groove and strength to the compositions!

We're only on the fourth month of 2007 and "Mourning Dawn" have to be one of the best doom metal releases of the whole year, not only so far! If you like doom metal that sounds extreme, terrifying and desolate then you must buy this one for your own good and remember, only 1000 copies! So hurry!


Rating breakdown
Performance: 9
Songwriting: 9
Originality: 8
Production: 8





Written on 07.04.2007 by "It is myself I have never met, whose face is pasted on the underside of my mind."



Hits total: 2953 | This month: 7