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It surprises me that after more than 25 years of listening to metal that I can come across an artist that I’ve somehow unconsciously avoided their entire and in this case, extensive discography. Dawnbringer is that artist, a name that I’ve read about and made a mental note to check out, only to forget about soon after. So, when their latest album, Night of the Hammer, became available for review, I figured this was the time to rectify my oversight. Night of the Hammer is like listening to many of your favorite metal albums from the late ’70s and early ’80s all rolled into one. Dawnbringer is (singer/song-writer) Chris Black’s vision of heavy metal, and what a glorious vision it is.
Night of the Hammer kicks off with ‘Alien’, a song that explores the heavy riffing style of Celtic Frost and melds it with the melodic twin-guitars approach that was popularized by the iconic bands of the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Black’s harmonized vocals often boast a soaring chorus and are the glue that binds Dawnbringer’s sound into a unified whole. ‘Hands of Death’ is a great example of this, it is the album’s longest track and has my vote for one of the top songs of the year. The moody, heavier, doom-laden pieces like ‘Nobody There’ and ‘Damn You’ are a clever juxtaposition to the epic storytelling of ‘Xiphias’ and ‘One-Eyed Sister’, which wouldn’t be out of place mentioned alongside the well-paced Viking-Metal of Twilight of the Gods-era Bathory.
Overall, the songs of Night of the Hammer are mid-paced, but with creative head-banging rhythms – well, maybe head-nodding rhythms would be more accurate. That is of course until the total lurking doom of ‘Damn You’, which begins at a snail’s pace, but builds slowly into more thrash territory before segueing brilliantly into the all out Black Metal assault of ‘Not Your Night’, where we’re introduced to Black’s witching rasps. The following track, ‘Funeral Child’, had me scratching my head at first. It creeps out of the gate wielding the flag of what I thought was some menacing primitive Death Metal, so I expected more of the rasping vocals introduced on the previous song. Instead, Black displays an uncanny ability to pay homage to King Diamond’s distinctive voice, replete with falsetto, nice!
Integrated into the overall sound of Dawnbringer is state of the art heavy metal that at its heart is awe-inspiring. It is both captivating and imaginative, and is able to invoke a sense of wonder like the first time I heard Dio, Judas Priest, and The Scorpions at a friend’s house, whose older brother would play their tapes for me. Dawnbringer’s Night of the Hammer had me smiling on first listen and on repeat listens, which is now already in the dozens, and continues to fill me with nostalgic wonder, similar to those great metal albums from my youth, where I know the words and riffs before they happen.
Nostalgia may seem counterintuitive to some, that is to use the past to define the present, but nostalgia has been an integral part of the modern condition, something that is present whether or not we identify and engage it or repress and deny it. Dawnbringer are far from ignoring or defying tradition, instead, they are attempting to redefine it within their own vision. Therefore, those of us that grew up with those aforementioned bands should not be surprised to find elements of nostalgia in Dawnbringer’s sound. One that provokes a sentimental idealized relationship with the past while exploring those sounds within a modern context.
