Dawnbringer - Into The Lair Of The Sun God

Lately, a new trend in traditional heavy metal has been occurring. Traditional heavy metal bands started to feed themselves with different influences from bands and styles you wouldn't even expect, and now, scores of bands have tried incorporating queer twists into their simplistic approach to music. Also, Profound Lore Records, one of my favorite metal labels of the now has been signing particularly bizarre and original bands. What do you get when you fuse Profound Lore with heavy metal oddity? You get Dawnbringer. Although I have not been able to investigate their album ''Nucleus'' closely enough, I do high hopes for the band as their fifth effort ''Into The Lair Of The Sun God'' proves to be an unanticipated blow, an inviting, innovative mixture of traditional heavy metal, thrash, early power metal aesthetics along with an atmospheric black metal touch, in order to exude memorability, and much needed adoption of warm, cleansed heavy metal overtones.

''Into The Lair Of The Sun God'' has a penchant of using queer chords and less common scales, which makes it quite a bit of an oddball in the traditional heavy metal universe. It has a relatively vast and comprehensively mournful collection of tinging melodies and such, with slower, mellow clean guitar and bass sequences usually dominating breaks. Listening to this is enjoyable because the album shows little signs of predictability, so you don't really know what's about to come when, and with such a nice, alluring selection of classic heavy metal riffs and melodious arrays of soft solos, it's hard to reject each riffs when they come knocking at your doorstep. Each track has its hands tightly around the other ones' tail, so the whole album goes on like a train as the songs follow each other, and with such obvious song titles like ''V'' (Roman numbers), you may b a little rattled and confused when you need to distinguish the songs at first. Fortunately, none of the tracks are lacklusters, and each one proves to be vital to the rest of the album.

The Archives dubbed Dawnbringer as heavy metal with heavy metal influences. Now, this is the sort of moment where you expect something chaotic, but at the same time dynamic, but ''Into The Layer'' swings its arm for another slab into the face, and you're left baffled when you can't seem to even find the vaguest of clues. You'll really need to inspect the aura and aspects of the music thoroughly if you want to find something palpable, but fear not, for your search will reveal a few dim results. The so called black metal influences are speckled across and around diverse tremolo pickings or even in sequences much more blatant like the sorrowful chord strums on ''V''. For such a misery laden album I found the delivery to be especially and the production to be warm and inviting, just like the yellow sunburst on its cover.

Ranging at forty four minutes, from outside ''Into The Layer'' would seem like a rather exhausting ride, but its spiking, vigorous riffs and well adjusted dynamics are always in play (or at least for a requited amount), so you'll be refreshed with a new breath of air and a cooling splash in the face with each track. The vocals tend to give out lots of monotony due to to their low delivery (unlike other heavy metal aspects), and that's a really interesting feature of the record. As I said, tracks vary, with ''IV'' and ''II'' being some of my favorites, but there are some truly queer twists the band can pull at times. ''VI'', for example. Its intro riff sounded catchy enough, with much treble given into it, but the real surprise came when that riff escalated into drum-guitar chomp with a synthesizer melody narrating it. So overall, ''Into The Layer Of The Sun God'' ought to be awarded with an accolade for keeping itself fresh and accessible throughout, and for the near-perfect execution of classy, soft, delicate music. It's not a grotesquery of metal, but it's a fun oddity for certain.

Highlights:
II
IV
V

Rating: 88%