I’ve been struggling for some time with the self-titled debut from Alton, UK, trio Black Skies Dawn. The album, self-released in a full jewel case (increasingly a rarity in this age of digital distribution and relatively cost-effective digipaks), tops out at over an hour and boasts mostly languidly-paced stoner metal, following the weedian path to riffy Nazareth. Nothing wrong there. I can get down easily enough with British doomers doing some heavy riffs – I’ve certainly done it before – but there’s something holding back Black Skies Dawn’s Black Skies Dawn that you just can’t get around when you listen to the album, and it’s the vocals. I’m loath to rag on an unsigned band for how things actually sound, but production isn’t a problem here. Everything the three-piece does on these eight tracks comes through crisply and thickly, which is clearly what they intended. It’s a question of approach. Even with guitarist Nick Johnson leading the charge most of the time and drummer Dave Hall’s ride cymbal acting as a pace-keeping crash (rarely the wrong choice), the vocals from bassist Simon Martinez do the album no favors.

It’s clean singing – one wonders in listening to the second half of “Thieves of Zamora,” on which Johnson adds backing shouts how it might sound if he took the lead role – but Martinez’s aiming for a very specific aesthetic and they just come up short. On the recording, he sounds as though he’s right on top of the mic (viewing live footage bears that theory out), singing in a low register as though to try and affect some of the Al Cisneros monotone that’s become so prominent in the wake of Om. He’s high in the mix anyway, and what results on most of the tracks is a kind of caveman sub-melody that follows the riff. Long instrumental breaks provided by tracks like “Sun Dancing Seas” and the smashing “Persecution and Execution” – the later being Black Skies Dawn’s longest cut at 10:20 – offer some respite, but when he’s there, Martinez dominates the mix vocally, and it’s simply a case of an idea that didn’t work. There is a lot to like about Black Skies Dawn’s first album – whether it’s their excellently doomed pacing, the morose and fantasy-based atmospheres they elicit on songs like “Bound to the Black Monolith,” the slow-to-fast build of “Serpent’s Tale,” or even just the fact that they’re trying something different – but the proverbial elephant in the doom is that this one side of their sound stands out and is in need of growth if it’s going to stand up to the rest of their material.

I don’t want to harp on it or veer from constructive criticism (which this is intended to be) into finger-pointing – so I won’t. Black Skies Dawn have much working for them in both Johnson and Martinez’s tonalities, and in Hall’s drumming as well. There are stretches of Black Skies Dawn where it feels like the band hit a real stride, and when “Other Way” comes in before closer “Bossonian Marches” with six minutes of quiet guitar, the effect is hypnotic and it’s enough to leave you wondering where those dynamics have been all along and why Black Skies Dawn didn’t put them to use in the other tracks. If anything, these flashes and flourishes set a tone of potential for Black Skies Dawn, and I’d argue that much of the album at very least does that. But make no mistake: they have work to do. As much as the production and the songwriting show they have a firm grip on what works in doom and stoner metals, they need to sort out the prior-discussed vocal issue one way or another, either bringing a singer on board or having Martinez adjust his delivery, because as of now, it’s detracting from the listening experience, and neither the band nor the audience wants that. It’ll be interesting to see what lessons they learn and how they develop their sound on their next outing.

Black Skies Dawn on Thee Facebooks

Tags: Alton, Black Skies Dawn, UK, Unsigned bands

This entry was posted on Monday, September 19th, 2011 at 11:34 am and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.