The Universe Within

Another Dawn Comes are a five piece band from Hungary. They previously released a split cd along side Emerging Beast, which came out in February of 2011, making The Universe Within their debut EP. The band have sent this material to Volumes of Sin for review. Cheers!

The album starts off really fast paced, "When Mars Calls to Arms" wastes no time introducing you to the entire band, all at once. From the get go, the vocals are noticeably distorted from poor recording and mixing quality and this remains an unfortunate constant throughout the entirety of the material. As far as the vocals themselves are concerned, there is a brash mix of crude black metal influence that appears briefly here and there within the six song concept album but mostly stick to a solid metalcore/screamo style.

The concept behind this album is crystal clear; the lyrical themes all center around the universe, and various (Greek) gods which the planets are named after. For example Mars is the god of war in Greek mythology and Pluto is the god of the sea, and there is also reference to Medusa in "Pluto the Solitary". The idea behind the lyrical themes is good, but nowhere near unique or well done. There are quite a few grammatical errors that stand out and are rather simple to hear, in "Pluto the Solitary" there is a line that goes as follows:

"There's no answer, so I crave my name into a stone."

The lyric is sung that way as well, but the word should be "carve". Overall, the lyrics are poorly written aside from the opening and closing tracks, which still have their own grammatical flaws that aren't as noticeable.

As with most metalcore, there are breakdowns incorporated into the overall loose and messy song composure, but the breakdowns are brief and overly simplistic in nature, which applies to the majority of what is present on this material. By far, the double bass drumming is what keeps this album afloat among the debris of stiff, unoriginal guitar pieces and inaudible bass riffs that one would assume are present since there is a bassist.

"Supernova" is the only entirely instrumental track given, it starts off with a clean picked guitar introduction before ascending into an even further light-hearted inspirational piece, and then descends into something heavier before picking back up again and vica versa. Without the immensely distorted vocals overtaking this track, the instrument quality stands out with clarity which makes one wonder what happened during the vocal recording.

Sadly, this is a poor attempt even for an EP and lacks innovation, skill, creativity and quality. There isn't anything present here that couldn't be found elsewhere, and done better. Except for the one-two beat that the drums occasionally take on, they are the highlight of this album. The rest needs talent honing, there are some off-key vocal errors as well, and the band as a whole need to become tighter and more fluid.

- Villi Thorne
www.villithorne.blogspot.ca