The seemingly timeless Swedish death metal outfit, Entombed A.D. (yeah we still have to use the A.D. suffix), has returned with Dead Dawn (Century Media). The album has a fair balance of the faster, thrashy kind of death metal but also dabbles in the slower, doomier side as well. While I enjoy both sides of the spectrum, it is almost a best practice to have a variety of tempos across the handful of tracks that make the cut for an album anyways. Obviously there have been exceptions to that rule, but when an album comes out where all tracks are enjoyable and do not follow a single formula, you have a solid release.

At just over forty minutes, Dead Dawn had some fun tracks that I could see myself coming back to. ‘As the World Fell’ is one of the slower, heavy tracks on the album that is one of the standouts. On each repeat of the album, this song became an anticipated track to get to. The slow head bang that ensues as second nature whilst playing is a tell tale sign that I found one of my favorites. ‘Silent Assassin’ is from the other side of Entombed A.D., the fast and technical side. Most of the song has a nice d-beat feel to it that is sure to get your legs moving in a two-step formation, specifically to piss off your elitist friends. The beat does change up a bit and even hits that memorable Slayer-type beat on the bell of the ride cymbal (you know exactly which one I am talking about).

Overall I have been fairly happy listening to Dead Dawn. Instrumentally, the album is tight as can be and is for the most part, memorable. There are just times when I expected either a nice growl or maybe even a blood-curling scream, but Lars-Goran Petrov just does not have those dimensions to his vocal capabilities. I just feel there are times where someone with such vocal abilities (even if just a backing track) could really give the sound a bit more backbone. Either way, chalk this one up as another solid metal release for 2016, but nothing revolutionary.

6.0/10

TIM LEDIN

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