(Below we present DGR‘s review of the new album by Dawn of Ouroboros, which was released last month by Prosthetic Records.)
Oakland’s Dawn Of Ouroboros have been a vexing band since their founding, part of a class of black metal collectives for whom the genre is one more arrow in the quiver than something to be wholly defined by. They’re part of a grouping for whom the multi-faceted, multi-genre approach has led to something less conventional than straightforward songwriting and more avant-garde with the addition of many a post-black metal and shoegaze element into their overall approach.
Being frank, there’s even been a sense within the band’s music that they’re still searching for how to jam all the pieces together, and so a journey into their discography can be a journey through just as many generally beautiful and transcendent moments as there are times when the band are still learning how to juxtapose such oppositional elements together within the same particular song.
As a result, they’ve been difficult to pin down on each album – like a creature stubbornly moving just to the side every time you’re about to finally set the specimen in place for display. They’ve been a musical cat that doesn’t want to be picked up, somehow turning to liquid and falling through your arms every time.
There is no singular approach to a band like Dawn Of Ouroboros, and so a single- dimensional approach falls to pieces within a song or two. Very few musical narratives fit the band as a result, but the one that has been steady is that as they’ve gotten deeper into their career, they’ve gotten distinctly better. Each album shows a stronger understanding of just how to take these musical parts and jam them together without it sounding like you’ve broken out a brad-nailer for that particular purpose. Their newest album Bioluminescence is the strongest example of that yet.
Photo credit Rob Watkins
The leap in songwriting maturity from album to album for Dawn Of Ouroboros has been impressive, and Bioluminscence already had a pretty good starting block to spring from. This is an album where it sounds like things have finally solidified, with all of their disparate elements and many-tentacled ideas finally wrapping themselves around each other in such a way that most of the this album’s eight songs sound organic, as if the band are finally immersed in their own dreamlike state.
There were already exceedingly strong hints at this on Dawn‘s prior two releases, and it seemed like they just needed that one more shot to finally sink the full ideal into a record. Thus Bioluminescence stands on the shoulders of its two predecessors, Velvet Incandescence and The Art Of Morphology, and uses them to leap for the sky. Many times in reviewing albums we find ourselves musing at how often bands are so promising and pointing toward such future potential, and with Bioluminescence it does seem as if many of those ideas have finally been realized.
Dawn Of Ouroboros‘ brand of progressive and post-black metal hybridization lends itself well to the eight songs here – though “Mournful Ambience” is suitably striking for the sort of closing song it is – with many of its five- to seven-minute brood drifting between multiple states of solidity. There are some suitably heavy moments throughout each song, but there isn’t one in particular wherein the band reserve the right to deliver a straightforward ass-beater and instead they aim for the cinematic style of scope.
It’s been mentioned above but Dawn Of Ouroboros are creating a dreamlike and painterly quality in many of their songs, such that they drift on their own awash in a layer of echoing sound and haunted vocals before the adrenaline rush kicks in and you get a decently-compacted run of blasting drums and warped guitar propelling the song forward.
You’d never guess this given the ratcheted-up intensity with which they launch the affair with the album’s title song, but that quickly gives way to the sort of floating on the auditory waves, clean-sung passages that the group have a taste for. As an introductory track it does an excellent job setting up the mood for the many pleasantly brutal soundscapes that the band intend to journey through. As a song on its own, “Bioluminescence” is a hell of an early impression and a semi-accidental showstopper in that you’re likely to keep this one repeating for a bit before you continue on to “Nebulae” following.
The ambition displayed on Bioluminescence remains welcome as well. Songs like “Slipping Burgundy” and “Fragile Tranquility” make themselves well worth the seven-plus and near-seven-minute journeys. The instrumental exploraitons taking place within both are something to witness; “Slipping Burgundy” aims for the unexpected multiple times and “Fragile Tranquility” instead has the job of serving as unspoken album closer, so it is the final summation act of this release.
While Dawn of Ouroboros are no strangers to flexing their artistic muscles and stretching their wings to make a particular segment work no matter how hard they have to try for it, in those two songs in particular the time spent is well earned. The many combinations of and extended passages through each song show how intricate the Dawn crew can make things when fully focused, and again, this seems to be the time when the planets have aligned just right for them and they’ve really crafted their sound into something beyond interesting genre-hybridization.
It is exciting in this way to see promise realized when it comes to the overall Dawn Of Ouroboros sound. You could always sense what the band were aiming for and previous releases had their fair share of golden moments, but to hear it almost completely nailed all the way through makes a release like Bioluminescence an exciting prospect. This is an album expertly crafted for constant repeats and the sort of release where you could tell Dawn of Ouroboros were building toward something great.
With a release like Bioluminescence now in their arsenal, the Dawn crew have fully made themselves into a band worth keeping an eye on – if you weren’t doing so already. It’s a beautiful wander through dreamlike moments and nightmarish heaviness, bent and contorted enough that it feels fully natural and as if this was the monument Dawn Of Ouroboros were destined to build. Now, we wait to see if they perform the same springboard act again and what avante-garde adventures we travel through next.
https://dawnofouroboros.bandcamp.com/album/bioluminescence
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