Blackened Melodic Technical Death Metal ain't easy to do well. Usually the melodic aspect renders flaccid the brutality that is DM's defining aspect, if there is a defining aspect to any one subgenre.
(I can only think of one truly immutable characteristic within Metal: Black Metal must be anti-Christian, or rather anti-One God. You can't be a practicing Jew, Muslim or Jesus-freak and play BM. Otherwise we're left with a list of commonalities, no one of which must be present for a band to be placed in one genre or another.)
Sometimes, when Tech-Deathsters strive for the melodic, we get the "accessible" sameness of Arsis or the odd, new-school heavy pop of your Sumerian Records bands. (Metalcore, FYI, forgoes musical technicality and is thus outside denigration in this particular review.) But occasionally we get something very special. Regal vulgarity, beautiful brutality, like a rose sprouting from a whirlwind of razor blades or a mace wrapped in velvet: the "Supreme Black/Death Metal Art" of Belphegor, or the mighty Behemoth, or Nile's Atmospheric Brutal Tech-Death can have you humming along as they beat you to death with mind-blowing, uncompromising musicianship.
Abysmal Dawn fall into the latter, and despite some eight years now on "major" underground labels (Relapse currently), they don't get the recognition they deserve. I advise any Metalhead to go to a show or pick up an album and help change this. I shit you not: they arguably outperformed both Origin AND 1349 last night at the Dirty Dog in Austin. Hail.
Courtney Barnett
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