Dawn of Sorrow

Arriving in December last year, this seventh album from Wraithlord failed to reach a lot of people's lists of top underground black metal releases for 2022 but it may yet hit their lists for 2023 if Italian label Canti Eretici, picking the album up for a cassette release in January 2023, can help it. A duo originally founded by Maximilianus Tyrannus in 2019 and going on to release seven albums in the space of four years, Wraithlord are rapidly growing into an act defying all genre expectations and "Dawn of Sorrow" is surely Exhibit A if Wraithlord (M himself and drummer / co-vocalist Nlorgpipe) had to prove their chops in a court of law. In the space of 68 minutes - less time than you need to see a short movie - these musicians quite literally traverse the entire universe of American music culture and folklore outside the mainstream through the lens of raw black metal. Nearly anything and everything at hand - dark neofolk, psychedelia, dark ambient / dungeon synth, straight-out melodic hard rock, powerful grungy doom metal - becomes an ingredient into their smoking mix and generating a heady and epic blackened metal hybrid.

The album mixes short ambient and folk instrumental pieces (of which one includes throat singing) with longer songs of melodic black metal mixed with hard rock, folk and/or whatever takes the duo's fancy. An early highlight is "We Shall Never Grow Old", initially a very pop-friendly song with catchy hard rock riffs for a good part of its length, before its real treasure of a down-home folk instrumental featuring jaunty piano and twangy mouth-harp comes stomping along. "Goldsword and Juno" is a good follow-up of rollicking blackened hard rock, acoustic folk and stadium metal bombast.

Much later in the album, we are treated to some epic blackened stadium heavy metal through which ambient faerie synth may pass in places in "1242". The all-acoustic dark folk title track with its sonorous clean vocals and intricate yet liquid guitar melodies is another unforgettable song, redolent of dark mood and shadows around a flickering campfire in the depths of night. The Wraithlord musicians perhaps save their best for the final track "Watchers of the Chasm (Up from the Subterranean Furnaces)", a grand mini-opera hybrid of darkly moody post-BM psychedelia, powerful grunge doom metal and meditative solo organ melody.

Each track is a different hybrid of at least two or three genres so the whole album can seem rather inconsistent though all songs are solid in their performance. Even though some combinations of genres seem very unlikely and even a bit risky in terms of the volume dynamics that could be involved, the juxtapositions of quiet and noisy are much smoother than you would expect, and in tracks like "We Shall Never Grow Old" and "Goldsword and Juno", the transitions from one genre to another are so quick as to be seamless. While the longer tracks with their catchy riffs, joyous rhythms and combinations of hard rock, stadium rock and melodic BM will grab most people's attention, the short ambient tracks should not be overlooked in the way they set atmosphere and ease the path from one energetic hard-rocking track to the next.

I did find that halfway through the album and later on, the music started to lag with some of the early energy and enthusiasm flagging a bit. At these points, the eclectic nature of the music can feel a bit contrived, and in "1242" the music can even seem a bit sickly in the synth parts and very ordinary in the hard rock sections. On most tracks though there is rarely a dull moment and even lesser songs have memorable moments of atmospheric black metal / dark ambient / dungeon synth / neo-classical majesty.

No doubt about it, this is a very singular and ambitious work in running a gamut across what seems to be the entire history of rock and metal and other distinctly American genres of popular music within the crucible of raw atmospheric BM. It does deserve to be heard in its entirety as its range of dynamics and the shifts between them, often overwhelming and disorienting, are a major part of its attack and style. After you hear the album all the way through initially, of course you're at liberty to pick and stick with favourite tracks – but you'd be doing yourself, the album and the Wraithlord men a disservice if you don't occasionally play the entire work to get the full force of it.