Before The Dawn – Deathstar Rising

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Nuclear Blast
Produced by Tuomas Saukkonen

The signing of Finland’s Before the Dawn to a more international metal label has been a long time coming. Having achieved cult status over the last few years, and been an outright hit in their own country (last year’s Decade of Darkness topped the Finnish singles charts), the move to a much larger label seemed inevitable. Deathstar Rising is the first album for Nuclear Blast, as well as being their first album in three years.

Like many of the current crop of Finnish melodeath bands, Before the Dawn are not content to play by-the-numbers melodic death metal. Indeed, you’d be hard pressed to find many musical comparisons between the band and the melodeath bands of the early 90s such as At The Gates. Rather than using the riffing style so synonymous with the genre, Before the Dawn tend to have a much simpler sound, focusing on clear melodies with short and simple guitar parts. The band’s more moderate pace also separates them from the melodeath pack, for better or for worse, whilst also utilizing a darker, more somber feel in their music. This has led to them often being considered a goth metal/melodeath hybrid, not easily fitting in with either genre but appealing to fans of both. To further emphasize this, the band have two types of vocal – founding member Tuomas Saukkonen’s harsh, doom-death growl and Lars Eikind’s very clean, emotive singing.

The most important question really is whether or not anything has changed with Before the Dawn sound wise. Since the release of Soundscape of Silence in 2008, Tuomas Saukkonen has led a solo project Black Sun Aeon. Whilst Before the Dawn’s sound has more or less been pinned down, Black Sun Aeon took the writer’s music in a much darker, doomier and more diverse direction, all but abandoning the melodeath sound in the process. In the meantime, last year’s Before the Dawn release Decade of Darkness stuck mostly to the band’s established sound but was noticeably more melodic than the band’s previous releases – Saukkonen’s growl being much less focal, and the material generally being more melody-driven than normal. One had to wonder in which direction would the band’s debut for Nuclear Blast go – would it continue to be more melodic like the band’s prior EP, or would the darker direction of Tuomas’s solo project influence the sound of the band as a whole?

The answer is, well, neither. Deathstar Rising is Before the Dawn sticking to their guns and sounding exactly as they have sounded for the last few full length albums. Certainly, this record does sound much cleaner than prior records – perhaps losing some warmth in the process – but not to any radical degree. This is for all intents and purposes an atypical Before the Dawn record, at no point during this album are we given something new and unexpected.

Whether this is a problem for the listener or not really depends. There’s no denying the band know how to craft a good song, and the likes of Winter Within and Deathstar are great, anthemic metal tunes. The band’s simpler style works exceedingly well with the more melodic material when compared to more frill-heavy bands, and this is well demonstrated. The band aren’t breaking any new ground with this release – but when you’ve got good songs, there’s no need to reinvent the wheel.

Veteran listeners might find themselves less accepting, though. Whilst indeed true to the sound of the band, rather often there is the feeling that as good as these songs are, they do sometimes sound like rehashed versions of previous songs. The lack of progress means that the songs from Deathstar Rising are almost interchangeable from those on Soundscape of Silence or Deadlight. This isn’t because the band are lazy – we already know that Tuomas Saukkonen has plenty of innovative ideas from his output in Black Sun Aeon – but perhaps more because they want to keep to what has made the band popular in the first place.

Most importantly though, Deathstar Rising isn’t the place for wild innovations. As the band’s debut for Nuclear Blast, the most important thing is for Before the Dawn to establish to potential new listeners who they are and what their sound is, whilst at the same time delivering a strong release. In that regard, Deathstar Rising is a good record and a more than passable introduction to the band as a whole. It certainly suffers from being more of the same, but that doesn’t take away from the fact that it is an otherwise decent entry in the band’s catalog. Next time, though, it would be nice to see something more groundbreaking.

“ the band know how to craft a good song ”

Tracklist: The First Snow / Winter Within / Deathstar / Remembrance / Unbroken / Judgement / The Wake / Sanctuary / Butterfly Effect / Wraith

Written by James Donovan
More: 2011, Albums, Death Metal, Gothic, Before The Dawn