I've been sitting here for a few minutes now trying to think of some funny reason why it is that Olde are practically unknown and rarely (never?) talked about. They're almost un-Googleable, but not quite because they've got that "e" on their end to make their name extra fancy and they did actually bother to name their album, which helps with one's Google-fu. Perhaps it's because they're an international act featuring members from the U.S. and Ireland, two countries that produce black metal that most folks don't seem to care much about unless the band members look like chartered accountants or they pretend they're from China or Denmark in order to appear less boring (or both!). I mean, the vocalist is the new frontman for Mael Mordha, who I was pretty sure was everyone's go-to band for big bombastic Celtic doom, and the guy who does everything else in the band is none other than Chad Davis of Hour of 13 fame. I mean, I know Hour of 13 aren't Saint Vitus or anything, but plenty of people have heard of them and like them. Right?
Other than the fact that like, ten dudes have listened to this album, the other really shocking thing here is that the band sounds a lot different from what you might expect. For one they're called "Olde" and have a logo that looks sort of like if someone from 1995 met a time traveller from 1996 who described the new Falkenbach logo to him and he tried to recreate it using powerful WordPerfect technology. Secondly, Chad Davis has been in a bunch of black metal bands but he's most famous for doing doom and the singer fronts a folky celtic doom band. But somehow combining these two things together results in something that doesn't sound anything at all like early Ereb Altor. I was sure it would! Then again, he hasn't actually appeared on a Mael Mordha album just yet, so maybe that band is trying to sound like early Primordial now instead of trying to sound like later Primordial like they have been recently. So then, what DOES this actually sound like? Well, things do take a turn for the folkier (melody-wise) in the middle section of the album, but this thing's mainly driven by blastbeats and searing tremolo guitars. Synths are almost entirely relegated to intro/interlude/outro sections rather than layered in during the metal parts, which is sort of a shame because they sound pretty good and would have added some welcome layers of melody to an album that sometimes is somewhat lacking in interesting riffs. There also aren't often distinct lead guitar parts, instead all of the guitar tracks at once shift from whirring sheets of chords to more melody-oriented lines. The latter have kind of a Swedish meloblack flavor to them, not too far from stuff like Vinterland really, and even the more chord-based stuff qualifies as Marduk-ish. Yet, there's a Bathory-based undercurrent to it all that pushes everything gently toward the grandiose, the folkish, the viking-ish, if just a little bit. Reminds me of Askival or maybe Arsaidh/Saor, minus the keyboard and traditional instrumentation flourishes.
But then, rather unexpectedly, the album shifts gears pretty abruptly in the second half. The drumming slows down to favor a swinging, shuffling stomp and the sharp guitar takes on an uglier, grunting tone. Here a much more raw production is used, which suits the more depraved material here. Even so, I can't help but feel like this album sounds more like a split than a cohesive full-length. It's pretty obvious to me that the material comes from two different writing/recording sessions. The writing remains repetitive, hbut ere it takes on more of a hypnotic character as opposed to the straightforward songwriting in the first half. The vocals on the second half are performed by the band's original singer, Mark Williams, who passed away before the album could be completed. Williams' vocals are a bit different in approach and delivery than De Roiste's in the first half, being more of a tormented shriek than De Roiste's commanding rasp. They fit the music on this second half a bit better, but nonetheless there is something of a jarring shift in mood.
This tonal shift leaves me scratching my head just a bit. I'm not sure whether the change in writing style for the instrumentation is simply the result of the band changing direction between the different recording sessions as some sort of natural evolution, or if the collaborative effort between Davis and the two different vocalists simply resulted in differing chemistry and thus different sounding music. Or, it could be that Davis was inspired to write in two somewhat different styles in order to produce material more suited to the two different vocalists, with William's shrieks working better with the more hypnotic, doomy material while De Roiste's was a better match with quicker, more melody-centric riffing.
In any case, the real issue here is that we get two (or nearly three, really) distinct styles of black metal being played here. You get the aggressive blast-focused riffy stuff first, then a few songs that veer into melody-heavy stuff yet still blasty, then the whole second half trudges through some sub-basement below a dungeon, yet within the confines of any given song on the album there's not much variation to be found at all. Individual riffs are fine to good, the vocals are full of fury and the drums get the job done, so at any given time-slice on The Gates of Dawn you're listening to something that sounds pretty good, yet I can't really say that the songwriting is all that compelling, at least not with a straight face. It would be easy to blame the ho-hum nature of these songs on the international-ness of the band, but it's only two guys working together at a time and Davis did all the instrumentation, so really he just needs to do a better job of hammering together his varying elements. Perhaps fewer, longer songs would give him more room to work with.
I've spent a whole lot of this review being fairly critical of this album, but really that's due in large part to the high expectations I had for The Gates of Dawn based on the folks involved. If I try to step outside of my own hype for the album, though, I'm left with something that's still a solid listen, if not super engaging. Heaps of potential, and the self-hype's hard for me to kill. I suspect the next one will be a lot more interesting.
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