(Before the Dawn released their new studio album Cold Flare Eternal on September 5th via Reaper Entertainment, and today we present our DGR‘s extensive take on the record.)
I worry sometimes that I might not be fully over the initial excitement of Before The Dawn actually coming back after its extended inactive period. To me, they were a perfect gateway band and guide for people into the more extreme realms of heavy metal. At times they could be immensely heavy, groovy, and sharp, and with a luxurious clean singing voice to help reinforce the music alongside some brutal growls.
Before The Dawn were a great way to ease people into extreme music. The good-cop/bad-cop vocal stylings have only spread further, and while it became the calling card of many a metalcore band proper, the Finnish journeymen that made the band up always hewed more toward a melodeath style of things.
photos by Teppo Ristola Photography
Before The Dawn wound up slowing down because they were part of a bevy of projects founded by Tuomas Saukkonen, who at one point had seemingly four or five bands going at once and all had full lineups and album releases. One can only imagine how thinly spread a person can get when you’re being held to such an incredible level of output, no matter how creative you can be.
So it made sense that eventually the bubble that had expanded would contract, and many of Tuomas‘ projects were laid to rest. The final Before The Dawn album at the time turned out to be more of a proto-version of the band he has carried on with since then in the more epic-minded and folk-metal-tinged Wolfheart.
And so it was, for a decade. Wolfheart kept plugging away – incidentally, the group themselves have a new EP out soon – and Before The Dawn lay dormant. One single entitled “Final Storm” was released as part of a re-release of the group’s 2007 album Deadlight but it wasn’t until 2022 that the embers that were Before The Dawn would reignite once again with a new lineup and vocalist Paavo Laapotti taking up the multi-pronged vocal front, while Tuomas Saukkonen wound up changing positions to sit behind the drum kit.
The story became clearer that this version of Before The Dawn was going to be very different from the previous one, as it seemed that the reins and the fate of the band had been ceded to become more of collaborative effort than before. Eventually this resulted in 2023’s Stormbringers.
I am on record at this site as having enjoyed Stormbringers quite a bit, but it was also an album that felt like a band slowly lurching back to life. A handful of songs on that record are very primordial in comparison to earlier Before The Dawn works, and some of them feel way less polished than they had been before. Sometimes, vocal lines just straight up did not work, as if they were written for a different person in mind and Paavo Laapotti tried his absolute damndest to bend them into form anyway.
Stormbringers is enjoyable and fun, but for every moment that truly felt like Before The Dawn were growing back into shape, there would be something that would cause you to just throw your hands up and declare “Ok! I guess!”, as if this needed to happen in order to get the band back fully and you were just willing to tolerate it.
This is part of why I found the Archaic Flame EP more promising, because these were songs that seemed as if they were written with the current version of Before The Dawn in mind and they also did the thing I had wished they would do more of on Stormbringers, which was allow Paavo to break out his hefty and low growl alongside his singing voice. He can clearly do both quite well, but wow, does he have a good, foundation-rattling low roar.
The two original songs on Archaic Flame did more to get me excited for the future of Before The Dawn than could be imagined. All they would have to do is carry whatever spark was lit on that EP into a full album, which brings us to today’s subject: the group’s newly released full-length Cold Flare Eternal and whether or not Before The Dawn were able to turn that spark into a full-blown fire.
With that in mind, the surprising thing after the first few listens of Cold Flare Eternal is how varied the album actually is. Of course, that invites the question of whether or not previous albums by Before The Dawn have done something similar, and the answer there is a shaky yes and no.
A trait of Before The Dawn’s career was that they were never a band for solid artistic throughlines for each album. Mostly, they were songsmiths, and so each album was simply just that, a collection of songs. You could argue this may have been to their detriment over time, as a person’s favorite album could easily clash with somebody else’s, but even then Before The Dawn either would sometimes by the alignment of the stars have one that sounded as if it came from the same sudden burst of creativity. This is partially why Deadlight is one of their more beloved releases. It’s a compact burst of energy and all of the songs sound as if they organically grew from one another.
Cold Flare Eternal does not sound as if it was done in one sudden burst but instead a variety of smaller explosions recorded over time – because even if you were to just treat it as a selection of really good songs there’s still another factor in play – which is that Cold Flare Eternal seems to jump from genre and inspiration-point between each song as well, resulting in album that tours through melodeath, prog, thrashier moments, and even a bit of Goth-rock via the Sentenced/Charon blueprint.
Cold Flare Eternal at least knows where its bread is buttered and keeps its songs compact. Most will hover around the three-to-four minute range and Before The Dawn walk away feeling punchy at the end of each one. Similarly, many of them are constructed with the clean-sung chorus, harsh-verse pattern that has long been a heavy metal hallmark. It’s not the most intense and earth-crushing music out there but that’s why Before The Dawn have always felt like an excellent welcoming point into the world of extreme metal. Harsh enough but also catchy enough to perk up many listeners’ ears.
Before the Dawn do at least demonstrate a knack for the melodeath ass-kicker on this album with songs like “Fatal Design” and “Stronghold” showing off the necessary aggresiveness to wake people up. “Stronghold”, especially, is a surprise in that regard as it has near-zero clean singing in it whatsoever. It is just a constant barrage in comparison to the rest of the album.
Other interesting takes on the Before The Dawn formula lay in times wherein guitarist Juho Räihä gets to steer the show on the melodic front – which does have the band leaning into the more epic and folk-inspired melodeath that the aforementioned Wolfheart have made their calling card. “Flame Eternal” and “Destination” are the intricately wound vanguards of that particular approach.
Which is why “Stellar Effect” tends to cling to the noggin so hard, even when it is led into by a couple of catchy fist-pumping rock numbers like “As Above, So Below” and “Mercury Blood”. “Stellar Effect” has an opening segment that feels like a throwback to the Finnish goth-rock days of the early-aughts, which was something not expected to see resurrected on a Before The Dawn album.
That lead melody and the keyboard line it wraps itself around appears constantly throughout the song, so much so that even when it settles into a classic Before The Dawn rhythm so that Paavo can start singing, it still seems to hang around the background like a ghost. Sitting at the mid-point of Cold Flare Eternal, it makes for an interesting segment upon which the album can turn from clean-sung and fist-pumping festival numbers to the aggressive melodeath blast that rounds out the back half of the album.
Cold Flare Eternal sounds like a Before The Dawn that is leagues more confident in their resurrected lineup than they were before. Songs on this album gel together far better than they did on Stormbringers. The classic Before The Dawn throughline is an album of really good songs and Cold Flare Eternal more than meets that standard.
There are some varied and wild leaps within the bounds of melodeath as a whole but overall these are songs as comfortable in their aggressiveness as they are surprisingly heavy. You get plenty of the Before The Dawn trademarks throughout the whole of Cold Flare Eternal and it is more than befitting itself a slot within the higher points of the band’s catalogue.
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