Dawn of Ouroboros – Bioluminescence | Album Review

Black metal, death metal, clean vocals, dirty vocals, proggers Dawn of Ouroboros present a fine spread of it all with their new effort Bioluminescence.

With a heady mix of grinding black metal guitars, unwavering melodic beauty and soaring angelic (and demonic) vocal styles, the latest offering from Dawn of Ouroboros is a highly enjoyable piece of work. Outside the band, guitarist Tony Thomas daylights as a molecular biologist, something that allows him to transfer his meticulous research driven approach over to the writing process, and it shows in the well-produced cacophony that the band is becoming more and more known for. Converse to this, vocalist Chelsea Murphy often chooses to improvise her vocal lines in the studio, allowing her emotion to come through and lead the way. This creates an awe-inspiring dichotomy of highly technical ethereal guitar work, and pristine clean vocals. This sense of clashing aesthetics is further influenced by Murphy’s demonic screams, which are just a deftly applied to the songs.

Whilst some of the songs on Bioluminescence are longer, there is never a feeling of it dragging out more than it should. Everything is very keenly poised against everything else, this is also reflected in the clean, quieter sections. Occasionally when bands decide to go down this route it can become the case that these are the parts of the songs that get skipped (this is especially a running joke for death metal bands), the clean parts here however offer real substance and prop up the other parts of the songs in a really well-thought-out way, rather than a side attraction they demand as much attention as the lightning fast blast beat laden black metal sections.

This is no more apparent than in, ‘Slipping Burgundy’ where the track starts out with the quiet, clean pristine vocal melodies only to drop into a triumphant metalcore inspired riff with growled vocals over the top of it. But Dawn of Ouroboros don’t stop there, further ramping up the ante into full black metal territory whilst constantly maintaining a sense of melody and grandeur. The band manage to combine disparate parts into something that makes a really complete whole, nothing ever seems out of place, each part has been meticulously chosen to support the others, and it really shows in a great piece of work. The highs on this album are super high, the lows are super low (in the good metal dirty riff type of way), and all the little touches in the background, be it string hits, computerised sound effects or echoing cathedral like reverb work together in harmony to create an album worth every minute of its run time.