Written By Kevin McSweeney
Dawn Fades III Album Review
I object to the concept of post-metal. I certainly have no objection to the music, nor do I bear any animosity towards any of the bands describing themselves thus. It’s just that the name of the subgenre suggests that metal is something that belongs to the past.
Granted, its illustrious history stretches back 55 years now (if we take Black Sabbath‘s eponymously-titled debut to be its starting point.) This is even longer than I’ve been around, and we’ve seen the sad deaths of a number of the great artists who set the music we love in motion, but metal is timeless.
It will be here long after we’re dead and gone, and so there can really be no such thing as post metal, because it will be around forever. Here endeth the homily. Go in peace to serve the Dark Lords: Dio, Kilmister and Osborne.
Oh, hang on. I’ve got an album to review. III is, believe it or not, the third full-length album by LA’s Dawn Fades, (They are presumably named after the Joy Division song New Dawn Fades, in which case, they’re the Even Newer Dawn Fades.)
The Californian sludge/post-metal band, according to their press release, are concerned with: “…creating heavy, immersive music that explores the darker corners of human existence.”
There’s much evidence on III to suggest this to be the case. Let us go through it track by track, in the Metal Lair house style, to see the outcome of this exploration.
STRIPPED
This is not a cover of the Depeche Mode classic of the same name, and Rammstein have already given us the definitive cover anyway. Instead, it’s a meaty original track that alternates between sludgy heaviness and grungy, almost psychedelic melody.
The dulcet clean harmonies are juxtaposed nicely with the harshness of Sam Sherwood’s guttural lead vocals. There’s almost a trippiness about said harmonies that reminds me of Redd Kross. I don’t know if anyone remembers Redd Kross, but I liked them.
I could have just gone with Alice in Chains but I will insist on being insufferable. Actually, the AIC reference would be more pertinent with regard to the dark dissonance of the guitar arpeggios half way through, especially as they are combined with those doleful harmonised vocals.
Overall, It’s heavy and darkly atmospheric – not a million miles away from a lot of modern black metal in that regard, minus the blast beats.
CLEAVER
The Irish alternative metal band Kerbdog had a song of that name back in the 1990s. I don’t know why I brought that up really. I’m only making myself sound old.
This Cleaver commences with a gentle pizzicato riff and hushed vocals over a languid groove, which brings to mind early Smashing Pumpkins, until the serenity is cleaved in twain by the arrival of a heavy, doom-laden riff and bestial roars from Sherwood.
The song is heavy but mournful; funereal almost, and strangely becomes more so as it speeds up towards its end. Lyrically, it’s super heavy stuff:
I’ve never seen a crueler sight
Coming down my eyes
No wonder
No joy
No sorrow
Your precious face
No one can take away all this pain and suffering
Come now and take away all this pain and suffering
They promised an exploration of the darker corners of human existence, and here it is, though it is concerned in this instance with ceasing to exist. (It’s never the answer, folks. Please bear that in mind.)
TRUE DOOM
True doom? I think Bobby Leibling should be the judge of that. This is a song that will have your hair blowing back and your eyes out on stalks, however. It is truly doomy – slow and elegiac in execution, with its intro sounding like a slow march to the gallows.
The wailing lead guitar is like Celtic keening, or the disconsolate wails of the banshee. It acts in this regard as the violin does for My Dying Bride.
The middle section of the song introduces more melody, becoming darkly psychedelic in the process. The third act of the song is an amalgamation of the previous two, resulting in a darkly trippy doom sound that has me floating away on a black cloud. The lyrics are about the fallacy of celebrity worship, and it’s scathing stuff that pulls no punches:
None of them give a fuck about you
You’re nothing, nothing
They’ll use you
They’ll use your children
And you’ll say thanks
I guess it’s something they see a lot of in LA, and LA can keep it!
IT’S TIME
The lacerating bass and pounding tom-tom groove combo at the beginning of It’s Time is all very Helmet, though Sherwood’s fricative snarls are far removed from Page Hamilton’s understated clean vocals.
It builds like a crescendo into an exclamation of enraged noise, sweeping aside all conventions of melody and rhythm, with repeated heavy cymbal crashes and the jarring repetition of “You cannot defend! You can try!” sounding like a deranged mantra. When the melody does return to the fore, within the confines of a mournful chord structure and 6/8 time signature, it is all the more poignant for it.
DRUGS
I like to take this song and its predecessor together, on account of the fact that it’s always time for drugs. In all seriousness, this is a dark little tale of addiction that seeks to glamourise precisely nothing.
It exposes the seedy and self-destructive nature of drug use from the perspective of a man – Sherwood – who is 22 years sober. As is often the case here, its lyrics are set out on the page more as modernist poetry than as a song:
I can’t get enough
I drift away
I black out
I come to
The cost
never
seems
to matter
to me
There is an almost hypnotic trippiness to it that compliments the heaviness more than might be expected, as is the case with much of Tool’s earlier output. They just love that 6/8 time signature, and they seem to do their best work in it, as is also evidenced by the final song on the album.
NUMBERS
Lastly, and not just making up the numbers, is Numbers. This gargantuan closer is more than twice the length of all but one of the other songs on the release, taking it out of EP range and up to album length.
It begins with clean chords and a languid 6/8 groove, over which the fey vocal delivery gives it a sense of dreamy unworldliness, even when the addition of distortion adds heft to proceedings.
It gets properly heavy around half way through, but when the melody emerges from the noise again, it’s like crepuscular rays cutting through stormy clouds. The guitars seem to be imitating whalesong at the end, which is slightly odd but a welcome addition nonetheless.
Lyrically, the song is a call for unity and to action. But against what? The Trump presidency? Late-stage capitalism? An increasingly authoritarian approach to governance in the so-called liberal Western democracies? Well, it was apparently written in response to the protests following the killing of George Floyd, and it urges us to unite and stand up for what is right:
If we speak with one voice we could strike them down
We’re just numbers at their gates
If you can’t hear your name get up anyway
The press release quotes Sherwood: “‘Numbers’ is more or less about believing we can have no effect on the world but really we have the numbers.” Ultimately, it’s a muscular but mournful affair throughout that seems much shorter than it is, and it bears an important message.
And there we have it. To quote the press release once again: “The sound of III is that of a band on the move, upstream and against the status quo … This is music forged in pain and purpose,” and I’m certainly not disputing any of that.
As for me, I’m still not sure about this post-metal business, but I’m sure this is a strong album, full of beauty and brutality in equal measure. And it’s independently released, so maybe show them some love. Let’s not let the brilliance of this fading dawn be too brief.
Metal Lair awards III by Dawn Fades four Devil Horns out of five
Get The New Dawn Fades III Album And Merch Here
Dawn Fades – Drugs (YouTube) Video
Tracklisting:
1. Stripped(04:53)
2. Cleaver(04:42)
3. True Doom(05:52)
4. It’s Time(04:24)
5. Drugs(03:50)
6. Numbers(10:29)
Total:(34;10)
Dawn Fades are:
Sam Sherwood – vocals
Markus Erren Pardiñas – bass
Mike Wright – guitar
Nate Hertweck – guitar
Scott Quist – drums on the album
DAWN FADES ONLINE:
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