(Before DGR and others around here embarked on two weeks of recent festival activity, he pollinated our archive of drafts with a great many reviews, and today we’ve plucked another one. This time his focus is the latest album from L.A.-based Dawn of Ashes, released in March of this year.)
Many, many moons ago – like last year for instance – I wrote about Dawn Of Ashes’ return to the industrial and electronic sound on their album Infecting The Scars. The group have gone through a few metamorphoses over the course of their career, careening into a symphonic black metal sound for two albums before settling on a harsher industrial metal approach for a few and creating something of a ‘scars’ trilogy, of which the current final act was the aforementioned return to the sound they started with on Infecting The Scars.
In listening to it, you could still hear parallels between the abrasive electronics, immensely catchy multi-layered keyboards, and effects-riddled vocals, and the more traditionally heavy metal influences that’ve played on the band’s shoulders for a while now. The distance between where they had started, where they wound up, and black metal’s taste for theatrics suddenly did not seem all that far from one another, and Dawn Of Ashes were acting as a bridge of sorts.
Dawn Of Ashes have been more dedicated to their artistic pursuits on all fronts than many of their compatriots, never shifting out of the leather-heavy outfits and butchers apron, forever appearing as tortured otherworldly creatures that dwell somewhere in the realm of corpse paint and cenobite. Clearly, they must’ve had some sort of fire lit under them in the time between Infecting The Scars and its subsequent remix EP, because the group have returned to us nearly a year later with another album in a similar vein, the equally dark and danceable Anatomy Of Suffering.
Project mainman and vocalist Kristof Bathory has never been shy about chasing whatever artistic pursuits appealed to him during the twenty-plus years that Dawn Of Ashes has been in existence. If there was some way for it to be filtered into this project or some way the project could fold itself around an idea or genre then it was likely to happen. That’s why this return to the hostile electronics era of the band has been interesting, as if the past of The Crypt Injection had reached a hand through time, grabbed Dawn Of Ashes by the throat, and declared ‘take everything you’ve learned, you’re coming with me’.
Anatomy Of Suffering continues the format resurrected within the bounds of last year’s Infecting The Scars – including bringing some other well-known names in that corner of their musical world back into the fold for collaborative efforts on a few songs throughout. Whether they provide a melodic line, some new effect, the whole takeover of the song, or a bonus attack on the vocals, the every-few-songs ‘featuring’ tag that pops up does keep Anatomy Of Suffering hustling forward through its tortured maze of synthetic attacks. With dark atmospherics in its back pocket hovering steadily over the entire album, a movie sample leading into the song a few times, and an immediate launch into pulsating backbeats, as uber-kvlt death metal artist Jon Bon Jovi once wrote “Who said you can’t go home?”
When approaching an entirely different genre than what you usually cover – though to be fair, I have cackled like a fool whenever presented the opportunity to throw a curveball at this here site – words take on different sorts of meaning. The agreed-upon lexicon for description of certain sounds or genre effects don’t work quite as well when you’re in a whole other world. That doesn’t change as much with Dawn Of Ashes, as their career shifting through multiple genre lines, crossing into and out of the world of heavy metal, has made it so that ‘brutal’ still roughly translates to ‘brutal’ at the same time.
At one point the meaning may have been exacting when the band were charging the battlefields of Dimmu Borgir with their own brand of tremolo-picked guitars, big symphonics, and increasingly hard-to-move-in outfits, but even under the guise of the aggrotech world we can still call something hostile and abrasive and have it mean exactly that. But, the appeal of something like what Dawn Of Ashes does would go up in smoke if they weren’t as equally infectious, which is why often on Anatomy Of Suffering you will still find yourself with a keyboard or synth line stuck in your head, vocals rasping over the top of it all – much like last year’s Infecting The Scars did.
Highlights within these grime-strewn halls of decay include quite a few songs. Even though Anatomy Of Suffering has been pitched as the darker and moodier followup to its older brethren, pacing-wise it is a faster disc. There’s more focus put on the constant drive of a song so that Anatomy Of Suffering’s atmosphere is relentless. The darkness and moodiness of this release is moving in fine iterations, as we’re already deep within the bounds of psychosis driven by techno rave long before we arrive at the latest pile of barbed-wire-strewn bodies.
The adrenaline-fueled drive of Anatomy Of Suffering, though, does much to keep things interesting because it never feels like Kristof and the latest collection of cohorts and conspirators are dragging their feet – save for a halfway-point interstitial track before Dawn Of Ashes are joined by a multitude of collaborators for the back half of the album. It’s just a constant and hypnotic thrumming over and over.
“Throat Woven With Thorns” could be viewed as the peeling back of the curtain and the welcoming into the album, and many of its ideas are exploded and dissected in later songs such as single “Viral Decay” or “The Altar Of Sunken Wounds”. “Throat Woven With Thorns” is especially violent its opening approach, ominous keys welcoming in that main beat and then spilling into the layout of many of Anatomy Of Suffering’s songs. “The Altar Of Sunken Wounds”, especially, retains much of its staying power from a series of multiple cascading synth lines that all collapse and echo over one another like they are bouncing between each speaker. There isn’t one full melody that is allowed to stay, and that restlessness creates a nervous energy to the song as each snare drum hit pounds its way through the track.
Where one’s head does turn is with the titular “Anatomy Of Suffering” song, which may have the most criminally ear-worm-written melodic line of the whole album. It may seem that we’re being flippant when we refer to this album as being dark and danceable – especially given the murderous imagery in play – but we’d challenge someone to listen to that main melody that twists its way through the song’s entirety and not find themselves humming along. It is as powerful as some of the strongest thrash metal guitar leads out there, except it continually wraps its way back to make sure that each echo of it is steadily on beat.
This particular motif is also replicated a few times when Dawn Of Ashes welcomes other crews into the fold on songs such as “Autopsy Of A Spirit” and “Penumbra”. “Penumbra” especially deserves some praise for being an aforementioned ‘slower song’ that still doesn’t seem as if the group are dragging their feet. It is a song that is mostly spectacle, with drums that sound as if they are the releasing of steam vents, filling the room with a sort of fog that steadily obscures the group as each song goes on. Dawn Of Ashes keep around the same four-to-five-minute run time as well, so no song overstays its welcome except for the indulgent “Threading The Nerve” at a beefy 6:42 – the song itself sounding like the collision of multiple ideas that Dawn Of Ashes just didn’t want to let go of lest they turn around and strangle them.
Dawn Of Ashes’ recent prolific nature means that now with Anatomy Of Suffering on your table, you effectively have a double-album and a remix EP of drums and harsh vocals to assault you for a while. The cavalcade and flood of keyboard lines to keep one entranced as various tales of torture and violence are spelled out with surgical precision will leave one still feeling ‘beaten’ long after the album’s wrap. Anatomy Of Suffering’s meaner focus yet quicker nervous energy makes for quite the appeal in this world wherein metal tropes are filtered into new hostile landscapes.
Dawn Of Ashes being able to speak the language of symphonic black metal has paid dividends, and their morphosis through industrial metal and back into their current strangulation by electronic wire form has resulted in a project that seems to have always known where it should land from the moment it started. It’s more evident that whatever Dawn Of Ashes aspires to, they’re probably going to excel at with a surgical efficiency, and currently, they’re exceeding very well at returning to the form they started with. Even with a year-over-year turnaround on albums, Anatomy Of Suffering is an impressively worthy follow up.
https://dawnofashesofficial.bandcamp.com/album/anatomy-of-suffering
https://dawnofashes.band/en-usd
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