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Black Skies Dawn, Black Skies Dawn: Marching to Zamora

Posted in Reviews on September 19th, 2011 by JJ Koczan

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.

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