Band: TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN
Genres: Punk / Rock / Hardcore / Emo / Emotive Hardcore / Screamo / Emo-violence / Skramz / Grind / Metal / Noise / ExperimentalRelated artists: ?.
Country: Ann Arbor, Michigan USA
Years Active: 2016-present
Song: "Stains"
Album: "Weak"
Year: 2016
For fans of: Circle Takes The Square, Under A Sky So Blue, The Spirit Of Versailles, My Bloody Valentine, Amygdala, Nayru, The Truth About Dreaming, You And I, Tel Fyr, Black Knight Satellite, Okkotonushi and The Pine aka PROPER SCREAMO.
Label(s): Self Released
This post's artist is from the November 2016 Mix. This is track #9.
This post's artist is from the November 2016 Mix. This is track #9.
I received a message in the Zegema Beach Records inbox from Caroline about reviewing her new band's debut release for TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN titled 'Weak'. I jammed the first song and was pretty much floored. I then jammed the remaining three songs and was impressed, but less so. Then I found out they were a two piece and it simply blew my mind. How do two people make all this noise?
TERRIBLE AS THE DAWN are a band seemingly based around the idea of insane juxtapositions and a vast array of influences. Songs generally play with a soft/hard dynamic, including crazy high-pitched female shrieks and raw male screams that may or may not be mixed with clean singing. The four song EP also eclipses the 20-minute mark, so each song is hefty 5+ minutes long.
The opener "Stains" is 5:21 and has so many parts it's easy to get lost in the myriad of styles, although it's certainly hard to forget that insanely screamy and pounding emo-violence opening that gets all post-metal at around 45 seconds and straddles a few genres as well as bands, including Tel Fyr and The Truth About Dreaming. At about 2:40 the song enters a new stage of development and gets dreamy, spacey emo that then dissolves into noise until 4:08 when a towering riff and throat-wrenching screams bring the fucking house down. This is the only song on the album with no clean singing, which is a plus for this reviewer. So now we come to tracks two to four, starting with the prodigious "Break You" which breaks the seven-minute barrier. It begins with spastic screamo and dual vocals that take a breather come the 40-second mark only to get all screamy again at 1:07. Over the next six and a half minutes the song weaves through a goddamn decathlon, most of which is stellar, although I'm still on the fence about the singing, as at 3:25 the warbly singing comes in. It's well placed and the melodies are catchy but the notes aren't always there (or perhaps I'm just not hearing them). That being said, I know lots of people who love this kind of singing (aka The Pine or You And I) and even though I hope it's downsized on the next recordings, I find myself humming the vocal parts long after I'm finished the song. "Dead" drifts like a body in the ocean for the first few minutes with what I just assume is The Pine worship (which I think fans of that cult emo band will dig...a lot) using subdued singing and clean guitars that sound more like indie rock and emo than punk and hardcore. By 2:32 the band mostly gives up with the slow stuff and catapults into lightning drums and screaming, although they do go back in and out of the two extremes. Closer "Ghosts" seems like it is mostly a straight up punk song right before the one-minute mark but, as per usual, the thing jumps around like someone with an extreme case of multiple personality disorder.
All in all I'm very impressed with this debut, and that opening song "Stains" is really freaking good. As I'm not a fan of The Pine, I'm interested to hear where the band goes next because I'm pretty sure some people are going to loooooove those clean vocals. I guess their next release will likely lean more towards heavy of soft. Which will it be? I dunno.
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DISCOGRAPHY
2016 - Weak digitalEP (stream/donate/download here)
