Dawnwalker - The Unknowing (Self Released)
Like fellow avant-garde experimentalists in heavy music Dawnwalker are less a band and more of a collective. Like the fantastic Crippled Black Phoenix, which is the creative expression of Justin Greaves, Dawnwalker really is centred around Mark Norgate (vocals/guitar/keyboards) with a revolving membership. This means that every album has something different about it, a new string to to the bow, different nuances and feelings conveyed in different ways.
With a brand new line up of members coming from Pupil Slicer, Malefice and Lure In/Deathbloom, Dawnwalker's sixth album is their most progressive to date, the focus on analogue equipment, no click tracks, playing together in as natural way as possible, the engineers capturing the band as they sound on stage. Special guests from Ashenspire and Pijn and recording in different studios like musical nomads, take them closer in spirit and in music to CBP than before.
This is no bad thing, as I love CBP and I've always really rated what Dawnwalker do as a band, across 12 years and five albums they have defined themselves against pigeonholes Norgate has navigated the band from studio project to physical entity, never doing the same thing twice while always keeping a vein of familiarity. On The Unknowing they have settled on a concept around our search for belonging, existential stuff that's brought into the real life by some brilliant musical textures.
Alongside Norgate for this journey are Luke Fabian on bass, Chris J. Allan on drums, flautist Bella Band, and vocalist Sofia Sourianou, who serves as a haunting counterpoint, and provides native Greek melodies on the Spectral Mirrorpool, again making it comparable to CBP's use of multiple voices. There's more too it though, influences of bands such as Anthema (Sword Of Spirit/Novus Homo) and Porcupine Tree (Capricorn) are very strong, Dawnwalker's post-metal beginnings fading with the expressive, progressive but concise songs that deliver what they need too in under five minutes.
It feels a bit happier, maybe than previous albums perhaps inspired by the goth pop of tour mates healthyliving, the instrumentations are brighter and the concise runtimes make for an immediate experience. With lyrics that are far reaching into the grandest of themes, the repeating lilt of Thema Mundi creates a link though the whole record, Heaven And Earth brings the slow motion build of CBP with classic prog too while the flutes are put to good use on Cancer (Rising).
You can probably tell that I liked Dawnwalker's sixth album, it's got masses amounts of the musical styles I adore, but yet still much more to discover, an album you need to play several times to really get your brain engaged to. The Unknowing shows that this shift towards proggier realms was well justified and executed brilliantly. There is no wonder that this will get full marks as it's stunning. 10/10
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