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- Bands:
BEYOND DAWN - Duration: 00:53:42
- Available since: 1995
- Label:
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Candlelight
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Beyond Dawn have made various records in their career, becoming protagonists of an evolution that has often dared beyond the boundaries of the conventional, embracing an experimental, if not downright eccentric, approach on more than one occasion. In a repertoire that is, to say the least, colorful in terms of styles and artistic ambitions, the work that still seems to stand out with greatest brilliance and identity today is the debut album “Pity Love”, published by the historic Candlelight Records in 1995.
After timid beginnings in the early nineties, under the banner of technical and extravagant death metal, with the release of the EP “Longing For Scarlet Days” (1994) it became clear that something had happened in the world of the Norwegians, even if not everyone immediately understood exactly what it was. After all, at the time it wasn’t easy to be aware of any new trend within the panorama of extreme music, just as it wasn’t for everyone to ‘cross over’ and have a taste for sounds outside the metal circuit. Evidently, however, Beyond Dawn were avid and enterprising listeners and this rightly ended up being reflected in their music, from this point capable of surprising with its declamatory tone and the witchlike progress of a new mysterious ritual; a spiritualism for metal instruments which curiously often featured a trombone as support, for a final result which, in retrospect, could be recognized as a singular mix of British death-doom, edgy art rock of Swans ancestry, darkwave in Dead Can Dance style and even some hints of the rough and tribal mood of Neurosis, whose “Souls at Zero”, released a few years earlier, was evidently already setting a precedent in certain circles. Therefore, if at the time their proposal was roughly defined by many fellow metalheads as a singular approach to death-doom metal, it hid within it influences that some ‘omnivores’ would probably not have struggled to identify.
Having said that, “Pity Love” is the so-called squaring of the circle of this phase of the Norwegians, the synthesis of an initiatory path at the center of which there is a whimsical vein, definable avant-garde, which, even if in slightly different contexts, represents a recurring element in certain ‘borderline’ metal of the time, just think of their compatriots The Third And The Mortal, Ved Buens Ende, Fleurety, Ulver, without forgetting the Italians Monumentum.
The album can easily be considered a continuum of the previous EP, but it also marks a further refinement in the approach, an evolution in the union of the various registers, with more fluid transitions between the body of the death-doom matrix (where echoes of the early Anathema and My Dying Bride), an elegance which, on the airs suggested by the trombone, brings to mind the dandy imagery, vampire rituals and drifts into pure hypnotic abandonment guided by the aforementioned tribal-derived drumming neurosisiana.
The sensations are therefore certainly not lacking, but also the talent and cohesion to keep everything under a gloomy mood, flowing in its persistent inevitability. Once we become aware of all the ingredients in play, we are then lulled by this continuous transition, which tells us about a fickle, restless, but extraordinarily singular and pulsating sound.
The obstinacy with which the phlegm and cultured posture of Espen Ingierd’s baritone voice (sometimes supported by screaming backing vocals that betray the formation’s most extreme past) seems to spit in the face of the darkly tumultuous pace of the rhythm section is what makes the opening “When Beauty Dies” an instant classic, but the album is full of highlights, with “(Never a) Bygone” and “Storm” – whose liquid guitars were later also taken up by Novembre – standing out for their interpretative strength and for the very precise dialogue between sweetness and dissonance: a vision that at times almost seems to trudge, showing off twisted, syncopated sensorial and emotional patterns, but also delicate in their underlying sadness.
In short, an eccentric narrative, that of the Norwegians, between metallic and percussive sounds, silky and emphatic vocal lines, cacophonies and hatchings of wind instruments, guitars that explore different frequencies until they merge with industrial punctuations. A decidedly layered and enveloping progression, which ends up distinguishing the group from practically every other group of the time deriving from the death-doom genre. This particular fusion of sounds and atmospheres not only gives Beyond Dawn a distinctive sonic identity, but also elevates them to a prominent position in the avant-garde musical panorama of those years.
Although the band’s future path then took very different paths, “Pity Love” therefore remains a milestone in the group’s discography and a chapter that continues to exercise great fascination in listeners most devoted to the niche sounds of that period.
