Encountering Caïnan Dawn reminds me of the old ways. Obtain a record on the strength of a recommendation/ review/ nice cover. Get the bus home. Stick it on. Worry that it’s a bit shit. Feel a bit regretful because it might be another week before you can get another one. Leave it a couple of days to then discover there are a couple of tracks in there you quite like. Play it a couple more times. Get it. Covert. Evangelise. Ahh, the days of yore when you were forced to give a record a second, third and fourth chance because you were skint and couldn’t just steal it from the internet. There you have my last few days in a nutshell – feeling obliged to give Thavmial another few spins and boy am I glad my obligations to this site drove me to persevere. You see, for someone like me, with the attention span of a gnat, black metal is not the most obvious choice of music to be drawn into. Sure, there are plenty of black metal bands out there that will happily shower you with giant overtures, theatrics and ear candy – and I’ve been through my fair share of those. But, as we all know, nothing good ever came from being fed spoonfuls sugar. However, in this glazed age of syrupy categorisation and predictability there is always a dark corner of heavy metal to lose yourself in when all else around you fails. And Caïnan Dawn provide a very dark corner with so many subtle cracks and crevices to get lost in.
Thavmial is very dense, let’s start by saying that. So much so that I wasn’t immediately sure that the density was not inversely proportional to quality. Sure, there’s also a nice occultish atmosphere to it from the outset with harmonics and echoing samples resonate through the void of the intro track. There are some great rasping vocals and buzzing guitars. But then you could say that about a lot of black metal bands. But what becomes clear is the slow, burning realisation that these guys are in no hurry to impress the impatient like me. Yes, it’s all very French: there’s no explosion or sop to the casual listener. Just the knowledge that the worthy will realise just how good this is. All they require from you is your commitment, time and absolute conversion to the moment. And what seems at first like some pretty basic chord progressions begin to reveal themselves as something more magically complex, overlaying on top of one another and giving way to the next. Weaving together like some fearful and deceptively intricate web with subtle new strands constantly forming and combining.
To throw in a few names to conjure with, there is definitely an early Norwegian streak in here along the lines of Burzum, maybe a bit of Gorgoroth too, and it also dabbles in the carefully constructed complexities of some of its more Avant-garde countrymen. But in the end this has more in common with the dark heathen traditions of Black metal, possibly best aligned to Germans like Farsot – dark, sinister and addictive but without any of the easily digestible breaks that often adorn too many of the good old pagan black metal set. Rarely are two bars in Thavmial the same without some delicate shift or newly introduced theme and yet that all occasionally gives way to some bewitchingly simple but irresistible melody. Caïnan Dawn have produced an album that can beguile, delight and darken your day in equal measure. All it needs is a time to work its dark magic.
(8.5/10 Reverend Darkstanley)
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