Demo 1979

Another worthless demo that brings nothing to the table, except for dull Deep Purple wannabes. Yep, Dawnwatcher are far from being even close to original, and what’s more important, talented. The present demo consists of 3 narcotic songs that will put you to sleep in no time, and the main reason is, that basically nothing happens in Dawnwatcher’s music; it plods for 20 min – yes, the demo has 3 songs and it lasts 20 min! -, struggling to evolve, but never surprises, or not even pleases the listener, who gets the sensation of a slow, torturous punishment.

The music sounds like a bad mixture of Black Sabbath and Deep Purple; take Deep Purple’s keyboards times 20, add an overdose of Black Sabbath’s atmospheric effects, 20% more of hippieness, a coddling, melodic voice and the hard rock lullaby is set. In fact, that’s the biggest problem of this demo; everything goes sloooow and never seems to evolve or get to some point where the music becomes entertaining, exciting or mildly interesting. To aggravate the experience, some passages are repeated several times, and make the listener impatient or sometimes plain irritated; for instance, the “beep-siren” like annoying effects in “Taking it easy” and “Attitudes” are a tiresome, backfired attempt to imitate Black Sabbath’s atmospheric effects. In opposition to the British legendary band, the songwriting lacks punch, good riffs and a decent rhythm section to keep the listener’s attention; most of the time songs are singer and keyboard ridden, and the rest of the band will be present camouflaged in the background, or sometimes not present at all. Otherwise the main elements are quite appropriate to play background music; loud bass, muffled drums and vocals, keyboard permanently present in the music, gentle, mid-ranged melodic vocals and crunchy, fuzzy guitars.

But, Uncle Papadopoulos, isn’t there anything good about the demo? Is it completely worthless? Well, there are scarce moments where you can mildly enjoy it; the solo parts in “Attitudes” and “Taking it easy” are 70s styled solos, which I always enjoy. This would usually lead me to be merciful and increase the score, but taking into account that the 18 min left of the demo are utterly boring… no way.

If you are looking for action you should stay away from this, but even if you are not, there are better places to look for 70s music; for example, Black Sabbath and Deep Purple.