Band:	Golden Dawn
Album:	Return To Provenance
Style:	Gothic black metal, Melodic black metal, Extreme gothic metal
Release date:	January 09, 2012
A review by:	wormdrink414

01. Nameless
02. Return To Providence
03. Dark Illuminations
04. Dionysian Eucharist
05. Denial
06. Seduction
07. Vision Of Entirety
08. Self-Destruction

So you were asking for more meloblack with slight gothic influences, right? No, not at all? Too fucking bad, because that's what you're getting here.

Fortunately, this thing isn't half bad. In fact, it's pretty damn solid. In fact, it's so pretty damn solid that people who aren't fans of the aforementioned genre(s) probably won't have much trouble finding something to enjoy on this. So buckle the bottom half of your idiotic late-90s automatic seat-belts, we've got a blast from the not-so-distant-but-still-distant-enough past here that doesn't totally suck chodes.

All that said? Let's be honest here for a second. Even though meloblack is still a thing and can occasionally really melokrieg shit up--and Golden Dawn plays melodic black first and foremost now (the gothic touches here are pretty slight)--the genre just isn't, as a whole, all that intriguing anymore. Bands can't truly stick out if they rely solely on eerie and evil sounding tremolo-picked riffs and high-pitched harshes nowadays. And, regrettably, that's something that Golden Dawn seems to have only a loose and slippery grip on.

Lucky for us though, the guys in the Dawn are vets and tossed in quite a bit more than just a few solid riffs on this; they threw in a whole surplus of them. If that's all an album needs to get and keep you listening, then Return To Provenance will almost surely do you the trick.

These guys have been around for a long while now--a fact that's hard to miss for two key reasons: their sound is one that we've all heard and have been hearing for a long while now, and they write songs as people who've been writing songs for a long while now too. It's the latter that, if taking a disc at face value, counts more. Dawn runs with heard-it-before kind of stuff and adds some admitted minute but powerful flourishes to it?varying from the occasional improv-sounding licks to some more unpredictable vox passages?making Return distinct enough. A feat that can seem fairly trivial sometimes, but one that's admirable nonetheless. Everything here sounds as if it was carefully constructed and executed with appropriate attentiveness. So a kudos is in order.

You'll almost certainly bang your head and do the old cupping of the slightly-above-your-head-gods' testicles hand gesture repeatedly during this thing. Yeah, you'll probably not opt to come back to do that many more times with it when all is said and done (there are a number of melodic black albums considerably better than this out there), but this is still well worth the quick 35 minutes for a listen.