Dazzling Dawn

Labeling themselves post-black metal I expected something truly modern and clean, and was flat-out confounded when faced with the actual sound of Eclectika; was I supposed to laugh at the joke or was this truly such a bad attempt at taking black metal to a new level? Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the latter alternative – this was most likely meant to be taken seriously, and hence is an awful release.

The opening intro could just as likely have been from a teenage goth band, and that’s the truth. But the first few seconds of the title-track left some room for me to catch my breath and hope for something cool after all. Starting out as raw black metal the rawness quickly dissipates and it takes a turn for the bland and annoying. The riffing is extremely bland, and there really isn’t any one note that is interesting; it winds up more or less as a thin and screechy noise. That is until it breaks out into an annoying classically heavy metal flavoured solo, which doesn’t improve my initial impression. The main vocals would’ve been fitting for a raw and crude lo-fi black metal act, but sounds a bit muffled in the company of the musical aspect of Eclectika. Another attempt at adding something new and unique to the mix is the semi-crappy operatic female vocals, which aren’t even near as strong and powerful in delivery as it would’ve needed to really make an impact. Instead it just goes back to the teenage goth band again.

As I think I’ve got the grasp on the sound of Dazzling dawn the next track, Les démons obsédants du regret, takes the field. Suddenly it feels like we’ve taken a turn towards Russian folk metal (in the aspect that I find most such acts from the region to be quite bad), and the clean female vocals and generic acoustic guitar would’ve been more fitting on a Folkearth/Folkodia album, if they’d stripped it of the gothic keys.

I don’t get who this is intended to appeal to. No black metal fan would find this particularly thrilling seeing as it’s too riddled with melodic defects and genre meddling of unworthy variants. And I don’t know if the typical gothic metal kid would enjoy the harshness of black metal shrieks, nor do I imagine anyone into progressive metal would like it since it’s so crudely delivered. I truly don’t get this, I really don’t. Mixing mid 90ies melodic black metal á la Midvinter with bad attempts at imitating Within Temptation (a sucky, sucky band to begin with) just doesn’t go down right.

Originally written for My Last Chapter