Review by Sandre the Giant
We’ve had to wait six years for the new album from Spanish melodic black metallers Frozen Dawn, and now that ‘The Decline of the Enlightened Gods’ is here, we have to thank Transcending Obscurity for getting it to us. If you’re a fan of Necrophobic, Dissection or even Behemoth, you might just be in for a treat.
The ghostly melodicisms of opener ‘Mystic Fires of Dark Allegiance’ aren’t immediate, but if you listen closely to those great guitar leads you can feel an almost soulful melancholy coming through underneath rumbling thunder. A magnificent gallop of melodic black metal that signals the approach to expect from here on in. The spectre of Dissection looms large over the fiery ‘Spellbound’, while you can feel the time and effort that has been put into the band’s career with the ferocious yet tempered ‘Frozen Kings’. The rampant ‘Oath of Forgotten Past’ is a masterclass in high velocity black metal that also grasps at greater spatial awareness, beginning to open up into something vast near the end. There’s points where it feels like someone said, ‘I really like Watain, but what they need is more fucking epic guitar solos’.
The title track handles everything that Frozen Dawn do well in one track, mixing up the more scalding elements with their insistent melodic streak, before a wonderfully morose acoustic piece sends us to closer ‘Blinded by Light, Enlightened by Darkness’, a Necrophobic cover that does the job perfectly and really confirms where the influences can be coming from. Frozen Dawn seem unable to stick to a simple paradigm of black metal, instead changing tempos and intensity to enliven the spirits and conjure multiple epics of engaging, inspiring extremity. ‘Cosmic Black Chaos’ is probably my favourite example of this; subtle time changes regulate the constant blasting with more melodic passages, while a skull rending solo tears open a gate to a swelling atmospheric black emtal section that is truly glorious.
Remember that feeling you used to get when Behemoth kicked anything into gear around ‘Evangelion’? That’s what I get here, Frozen Dawn have grasped that tour de force and moulded it to their own particular melodic streak, which loses nothing in fury but gains exponentially in scope. ‘The Decline of the Enlightened Gods’ is an album that feels vitally alive and vibrant with black metal, which is a rarity in the genre at times. Dynamic, visceral and ferociously memorable, Frozen Dawn’s work has reached a crescendo right here, and it is thrilling.
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The Killchain 