Mythic Dawn ‎"Hyllningskväden" CD Digipack

Great Raw and Hateful Black Metal in the vein of old Darkthrone. Contains their Debut Album and EP. 

Digipack limited to 333 copies Old hateful Black Metal with the spirit of the 90s

The German label Astral Nightmare Productions have once again screened the deepest underground to bring us another obscure piece of dark and raw music. Mythic Dawn are a two men act from Sweden and have so far released one full length and one EP. Like a few times before Astral Nightmare have taken the chance to bundle those two outputs and released them as quality CD version for the collectors among us. This compilation comes under the name “Hyllningskväden” and while I have no idea what this could mean is sounds pretty cool. What you get here are 50 minutes of misanthropic music, although some of the harmonies are surprisingly catchy.
A typical short intro paves the way leading into the first set of riffs and atmospheric lead harmonies of opening track “Förglömd”. There is some nice variation of the main theme with the key notes gliding up and down the scale, but overall this is pretty much the kind of stuff we all know. That being said I have no problem with missing innovation, especially when it comes to black metal. Modern representatives of the scene should be allowed to look back into the past and try to figure out what the essence of the music is and what exactly has been responsible for the magic which embraces this genre. What really matters is the ability to capture these kind of feelings and deliver songs that are interesting enough to be relevant. Mythic Dawn show that with the right ambition there is still a lot of joy that can be brought by classic black metal.
There are any number of factors that could be listed to describe why this album is so excellent, but the most immediate is the record’s sheer listenability. Black metal isn’t what I would typically describe as a lofty or overly hooky style of music, but Mythic Dawn have here created a sound that is harsh and grim, but still comes with some really nice melodies. The band takes care that their tracks never lose their sense of atmosphere, intensity, and aggression with all these attributes balanced against each other. The flow of the album is great and while some of the songs come with more impressive harmonies than others there is no moment which feels dull or boring.
The album is broken up by the dungeon synth like track “En svunnen tid I” which only consists of keyboard strumming typical for this style, but helps further setting the right mood. This one is followed by “En svunnen tid II”, a quite lengthy song which appears to be one of my favorites here as it comes with a nice acoustic break and some glorious main melodies. The raspy vocals are more or less genre standard, and to me it feels they take kind of a back seat and let the guitars do the main work. The production on “Hyllningskväden” is also what you might expect, with thin guitars and quite a bit of reverb laid over the mix. The songs of the EP have s slightly warmer sound, but overall the production quality is pretty consistent over the whole playing time. That being said this is still much better sounding than a lot of the garage stuff that is produced these days and I can only urge each fan of traditional and cold Scandinavian black metal to give this one a listen.

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