Dark Fortress - Venereal Dawn - review
Dark Fortress - Venereal Dawn - review
Tracklist
01. Venereal Dawn02. Lloigor
03. Betrayal And Vengeance
04. Chrysalis
05. I Am The Jigsaw Of A Mad God
06. The Deep
07. Odem
08. Luciform
09. On Fever's Wings
10. The Deep [acoustic version] [bonus]
A review by
Doc G. August 22, 2014
Dark Fortress albums are typically long affairs, and Venereal Dawn is no different. This is a real whopper of an album when it comes to scope, which progresses and unfolds at such a beautiful pace, it's quite difficult imagining how they'd fit this all in in under its seventy minutes.
First, we take the core of what Dark Fortress is; a melodic black metal act, with tasteful balancing between hyper-aggressive black metal and mellow, ambient passages. Throw in some subtle, haunting keyboards underneath the mix, and you've got the raw product. Then the fun begins...
Each track is taken with a different approach, sometimes subtle, sometimes a drastic side-step. Regardless, it all flows together perfectly. The cohesiveness of the album is very deliberate, it's not a collection of songs, it's rather a bunch of smaller pieces to a bigger story. "Lloigor" is the sound of Opeth's Blackwater Park meets Keep Of Kalessin's Kolossus. From the latter half of "I Am The Jigsaw Of A Mad God" until the end of the album, it begins to pick up a Rotting Christ Aealo approach - a lot of chugging, chanting, stomping rhythmic segments with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean overtones. In between all that you've got epic black metal all the way down to bleak minimalist segments with whiffs of blackened shoegaze wafting by. "On Fever's Wings" is the ultimate closing track for this grand adventure of an album. It's like that closing number in musicals where the entire cast of characters comes out to close the show; in this eleven minutes, you'll find Venereal Dawn encapsulated in its entirety.
?But you've already come to expect all this from Dark Fortress. Duh. The gradual incline in detail, depth and quality from Séance to Eidolon to Ylem should have been a dead giveaway where this was heading. The only tangibly new piece to the Dark Fortress arsenal is just how proggy this album is. There's several passages that are sure to strike you as distinctly Opethian...Well, more like Opeth on peyote, but I digress.
Dark Fortress have been kicking around for some time now, gaining popularity but hardly being at the forefront in many people's minds. If this doesn't bring them Dimmu Borgir, Behemoth or Keep Of Kalessin levels of popularity in the uber-digestible black metal field, surely there's no hope...And you should all feel like terrible people for not telling enough friends about it.
Comments
Comments:
14
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398 users
 Posts: 21306 |
Posts: 21306
Awesome, it sounds like this turned out to be exactly what I was hoping for back when they first released a stream of some of their new songs.
---- "Wise men talk because they have something to say; fools because they have to say something."
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Posts: 3099
Nice review, sounds like this one will easily break any concerns of standard black metal boredom. I'll be listening out for it.
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 Posts: 756 |
Posts: 756
Well written! You made this sound interesting, will check it out!
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Posts: 149  |
Posts: 149
I was considering giving this band a chance for some time now. This review convinced me to do it.
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 Posts: 5161 |
Posts: 5161
I really wasn't convinced by the two songs they released separately. I've always liked their "only concept albums" approach, so I'll discard what I thought of the two songs and give it a listen anyway.
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 Posts: 7263 |
Posts: 7263
Venereal Dawn sounds like that one morning I woke up sore in a downtown back alley behind a gas station during Gay Pride weekend. Shit, I just realized that's my second consecutive gay buttsecks joke today. I suppose I have been fucked at work tonight, but in a different way.
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 Posts: 9726 |
Posts: 9726 Written by Dangerboner on 22.08.2014 at 14:53  I knew it was only a matter of time...
---- "I got a lot of really good ideas, problem is, most of them suck." - George Carlin
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 Posts: 6212 |
Posts: 6212
Can't wait to hear the whole album. The title track is excellent.
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 Posts: 5068 |
Posts: 5068
Wonderful review, just like the band, definitely looking forward to Venereal Dawn, it's been some time since Ylem.
---- Dec. 30, 1334. ...And the whiskey and wine entered our veins when blood was too weak to carry on.
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Posts: 6212
Mature, intricate, engaging, accomplished. A strong contender for black metal album of the year.
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Posts: 1208  |
Posts: 1208
A very good album but I won't rate it yet as I seem to need more time to really get into it while Ylem was an instant coup de coeur ! I already love Fever's Wing tho 
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 Posts: 64430 |
Posts: 64430
Its indeed progressive, its such progressive what I like, its amazing album, maybe I will overkill but can I say its their best? rare when latest album us better as older ones.
---- I stand whit Ukraine and Israel. They have right to defend own citizens. Stormtroopers of Death - "Speak English or Die"  I better die, because I never will learn speek english, so I choose dieing
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