Here’s a gem released earlier this year that we neglected to share with our beloved Roadburn readers. Please excuse the oversight! Blame it on festival fever… Lovingly pinched from Avant-garde Metal: This album has been my subtle companion for a while now, caressing and soothing my soul at every spare hour. Submerged by its trembling, refulgent notes and honey-coated vocals, I knew I would have needed my time before I felt ready for a review: the right moment would have come along naturally.
And so it has, on an uncharacteristically rainy day when the sea shores are battered by south-easterly winds and the foamy pale green-gray waves crush against the blackened rocks. Watching the sea storm from my water-stained window, a timid fire crackling behind me, my senses become enveloped in the quiet, familiar melancholy that months on end of blazing sun had kept subdued. Dawnbearer begins to spiral inside the room with the thick, evocative fragrance of real Church incense…
Peculiarly, the songs flow so magnificently with their hypnotizing, probing, moving qualities, that I never quite felt the need to know them by their exact name before today. I enjoyed the implicit sensation of intimacy and completeness that this spellbinding work evokes, absorbing the lyrics as they ebbed and flowed. I cannot remember when an entire album was able to stir up within me the powerful yearning for the mind-blowing beauty and freedom which comes from a profound communion with the ancient rites, but it must have been a long while ago. Dawnbearer did so with the same poetic fashion transubstantiated wine fires up ecstasy by slowly trickling down the throat all warm, then bursting into the veins like a silent scream. If the first listen can easily inebriate, repeated ones will eventually lead the sensitive, spiritually predisposed psyche to the very place where it all come from in the first place.
Music is the Universal Lover, no matter which philosophical inclination one approaches it with – Heathen, Satanist, Buddhist, atheist – its primordial notes sing to each and every soul just the same. Mathew “Kvohst” McNerney feels he has been chosen by the universal powers, as the very name of this project testifies with transparent intent: high priest of the occult, poet and bard, you just know it is not about empty theatricals. His stunningly beautiful and eclectic first solo work is honestly and romantically drenched in the kind of magick that cannot but inform the entire life of both man and artist, and for this reason alone it is destined to awaken many a dormant spirit, luring them towards the self-discovery path, thus fulfilling its undertaking.
Continue reading: Avant-garde Metal – Reviews: Hexvessel – Dawnbearer.
Tags: Album of the day, Avant-garde Metal, Dawnbearer, esoteric folk, Folk Rock, Hexvessel, Kvohst, Mathew McNerney, occult, Occult Rock, psychedelic folk, Svart records
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 29th, 2011 at 3:48 am and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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