Paradise Lust

After couple of demos between 1994 and 1998, At Dawn They Sleep have finally released a debut album to enrich their discography and to rise up the quality of their music in all aspects including the production and the musicianship, which are by the way the most important figures in the music industry. Then Paradise Lust came off in a 6 tracks pack, too short for an album already, but this is not the main point to talk about, the music itself throughout the 31 minute is not completely convincing. In short, this is the album that could have been a masterpiece if some flaws didn’t come its way.

The music that you would expect in this album is basic death metal with symphonic and melodic elements, a genre that is not really rare to see, I mean it was the fashion back then, and At Dawn They Sleep tried to come up with something innovative and creative to stand along with their fellows. Anyways, musically they succeeded, and I mean the band members have done a good job regarding the musicianship. Here you can find nice enjoyable guitar melodies with basic but memorable riffs that created great feelings in the music. In addition to acoustic parts that appear in each track, mostly to set up the pace and change the rhythm of the processed sound. Magically the bass here works very well despite the poor production, relatively it’s very audible and actually it fits very well with the guitars. Along with the aforementioned instruments, the keyboard does a huge work in this release. It creates wonderful atmosphere supporting the guitars and adjusting the sound with beautiful symphonies that enhance the music and compensate the flaws that occur every now and then.

The weak side of this album looks to be the production of course, with the vocals and the drums. Although they didn’t completely ruin this album, but with better quality on each side this could have been almost a perfect set. First off, the production feels very raw from the first listen, it made the guitars look noisy and sharp for the ear, and weakened the sound of the drums. In addition, there is the annoying vocals that didn’t fulfill my expectations at all. The hilarious thing is that Jari Heino seemed to me that he is very excited to sing here, apparently he likes his own voice, but in contrast he should work first on his throat and do better growls, and then he can blow out those tones in fashion. In the other hand he turned to be a better vocalist when he did clean vocals. I enjoyed him better when he sang along with the female vocalist, as they did a good job on the track Iluvatar the most delightful song on this release.

Apart from the flaws that affected this debut album, I can give this a good rating just for the nice musicianship and the good effort put here. This band had a good potential, but unfortunately they came to a conclusion they can’t do better than this?! They unfortunately split up right after releasing the album, which is a sad thing since I feel they can still make much better stuff than this and deliver far better quality. If you are fan of atmospheric melodic death metal you should give Paradise Lust a shot, it will be always fun to hear such bands that appeared and vanished in the 90’s period.

Standouts: Birdsong, Iluvatar.

Written for Encyclopaedia Metallum 25-02-2011
© Kimiwind