A Dawn to Fear - Cult of Luna
“...there hasn’t been a metal masterwork like this one since 2004 with ISIS’s Panopticon”
From “4 Albums fo Obsess Over”
You won’t be the same after listening to this album.
When a band achieves a masterwork, it means they’ve succeeded at creating a piece of art that extends beyond themselves. It breaches the boundaries of the musicians that created it, unencumbered by their viewpoints, their biases, their musical prowess, their limitations – they relinquish any and all initial notions for what the project is supposed to sound like. The project takes on a life of its own, becoming a living, breathing organism as nuanced and complex as the minds from which it came. It is dynamic, capable of sustaining multitudes of diverse interpretations and revealing new ones with each new sociocultural context in which it is consumed. It is a universe unto itself, ever-expanding and full of questions.
A Dawn to Fear is one such project. Released in 2019 by post-metal alchemists Cult of Luna, there hasn’t been a metal masterwork like this one since 2004 with ISIS’s Panopticon (and if you ask me, Panopticon doesn’t hold a candle to this album). Breathtakingly produced, passionately performed, and introspectively written, the writing process for this record was more a meditative exercise than it was a series of jam sessions. Singer/guitarist and primary songwriter Johannes Persson elaborates:
"For pretty much every album there's been a very concrete theme. We've known from the start the kind of story we wanted to tell, and I didn't want that to be the case. I've seen a lot of subtle changes and patterns in my own behavior and my own thinking the last couple of years, and I wanted this to be a completely spontaneous process. I just wanted to see what came out of me, and 'A Dawn to Fear' is the result of that."
I’m obsessed with this album because it engenders life’s biggest questions – life, death, happiness, divinity, history – into every moment of every song. It balances a primal temperament with expansive atmospheric production, hypnotizing listeners with its simple, radiant beauty.
“I’m obsessed with this album because it engenders life’s biggest questions – life, death, happiness, divinity, history – into every moment of every song.”
The album’s opening track, “The Silent Man,” is driving and emotive, a swirling vortex of atmospheric calm and driving rage. The Silent Man is a dangerous man. It happens so slowly that no one notices the change. The world is not the same in his eyes. What came before is not here and it angers him. These are the words written in the vinyl record’s liner notes, which explain the concept of each song beyond the written lyrics. This song is prayerful and anguished, as it personifies a weeping Earth bitterly lamenting the rapid and disastrous changes that have been wrought upon it in so little time. It’s like a deep ancestral power, cracking its way through the Earth, only to find it’s been lain to waste.
“Lay Your Head to Rest” is like the Egyptian pyramids, the Taj Mahal, or La Sagrada Familia – it’s mesmerizingly gargantuan. Beginning with a titanic bass line and melancholy organ drone, this march-like song trudges through its seven-minute run time with a contemplative authority. Before me comes you. Our eyes connect before sleep wins you over. Heavy lids close. A new world opens. These liner notes reflect the calm-within-the-storm feeling and the serenity of dreaming that this song vibrantly encapsulates.
“It’s like a deep ancestral power, cracking its way through the Earth, only to find it’s been lain to waste.”
The album’s title track summatively invokes the most primal, irrational human emotion – fear. Not the fight-or-flight response one has when presented with immediate danger, but the more haunting, gnawing, existential dread that one experiences just through being alive: With eyes peeled into the night. Willing to negotiate with what will be. Mind buried in fear of light. A cold burn awaits you. Flee while you can. Flee. It is so very human to consider life’s biggest questions, which is a main holistic theme of this album. But it’s even more particularly human to throw up one’s hands at what we can’t understand – to submit to fear and beseech an uncaring universe. This song, with its sparse, emotive guitar lines and pensive vocals, is a meditation in the face of this Lovecraftian concept of existential danger and cosmic indifference.
The next song sees this existential fear realized in an unnamed lurking threat. One of the most conventionally groovy songs on the album’s tracklist, “Nightwalkers” is a doom-laden prophecy. There is something in the air. I can taste it. A northern wind travels from afar and hits me in the chest. The pieces that were missing. They come to me in my sleep. The ominous main riff sounds like it’s emanating from a cave, contrasting nicely with the bulky, stomping groove that takes over in the second half of the song. There is a history, an ancient quality to Persson’s voice, giving the impression that this band is intimately connected with a ubiquitous human experience – pondering the world around them, searching for the origin, and being forever changed by what they discover (and can’t discover).
“There is a history, an ancient quality to Persson’s voice, giving the impression that this band is intimately connected with a ubiquitous human experience – pondering the world around them, searching for the origin, and being forever changed by what they discover”
“Lights on the Hill” is a boundless, expansive exploration through the life of a ghostly protagonist. Above the valley. Upon the hill. A dead pine stretches toward the sky. At the foot of this mighty tree lies a story. The shadow it casts stretches long past the cabin. Where they lived. The solider and his wife. They were as connected as two humans can be. A bond strengthened by spite and hate. Beginning with an unabashedly bluesy, weeping opening riff, this song vibrantly recounts the protagonist’s love, rage, spite, and grudges over a lonely 15-minute journey. Each moment is rich in its own way, but stripped down enough that the listener can appreciate the song’s many crescendos. It’s as crushing as it is thoughtful.
With “We Feel the End,” the perspective of the album turns inward. The roaring screams and scorching guitars have been replaced by smoldering clean vocals and peaceful ambience, creating a tranquil solitude, like sitting alone with still water and a sunset. Fear walks beside us. All through the night. Eyes wide open. We are grasping for air. Dissonant noises. Everywhere. We feel it coming. It is almost here. Undaunted. We carry on. This song is pure and beautiful, a brief meditation to precipitate the dizzying magnitude of its successor.
“Each moment is rich in its own way, but stripped down enough that the listener can appreciate the song’s many crescendos.”
“Inland Rain” begins fairly hospitably, with ritualistic percussion and an immersive guitar lead. However, at the halfway point, the sky comes crashing down as the song descends into a whirlpool of gnashing intensity. Deep in this soil my heart lies buried. It colours the water to a beautiful red. A vein that flows through me. The blood we share is our link. Forever carved next to mine. Your name that I cherish. This song brings the perspective back outward again, dispelling the reprieve of the previous song with its dismal rawness.
As the album draws to a close, the reverential final track “The Fall,” ensures that it does so with a pithy message of hope. Its triumphant chord progression brings to mind the soundtracks of revisionist Western movies, which often follow heroes on gritty journeys that blur the lines between right and wrong, good and evil, dissolving all boundaries to pull back the curtain on the most naked portrayals of the human experience. This song works to the same end, evoking the familiar feelings (in metal music) of death, desperation, and squalor, but also justice, mercy, and love. It’s undeniably cinematic, featuring multiple contrasting sections and expressive instrumental dynamism. The album began in a dark, desolate place, deep underground and rife with struggle. But, with “The Fall,” it ends soaring above the clouds, the conflict having passed and the story having come to a satisfied end. With radiating eyes that caught me in a beam. A silhouette against the sun. Decisive hands show me the direction. Seek no more and wait for the dawn. We have pushed the world in front of us. It can die for all that we care. A burning candle can hold a meaning. A pounding heart can warm the night air. The collapse of the self. Capitulation to a moment. When love stands victorious, the silent man ends.
“I’ve never once come away from this album in the same mental state I started it in.”
I genuinely can’t believe that a piece of art this beautiful exists, and we all have virtually unlimited access to it. It feels too sacred for that to be the case. I’ve never once come away from this album in the same mental state I started it in. I’m not exaggerating when I say it changed things about me, forced me to reckon with the big picture and realize that my priorities were out of order. The music is brutal, but it comes from a place of calm and serenity – a place that its listeners gain access to. Every song is a hymn to the human experience, providing a vicarious connection to our species’ deep history of trying to make sense of the world around us. It’s about the fear of the unknown, yes, but it’s also about making peace with the unknown and the mesmerizing mystery of the world. The atmosphere of this album is so impossibly large and all-encompassing that it feels like there’s no space that could possibly house it. And yet, Cult of Luna doesn’t clutter their sound with intricate solos, complicated rhythms, or overproduction, because those accoutrements highlight the individual. Instead, they construct soundscapes and musical contemplations in a way that invokes something bigger than themselves. Bigger than all of us.
For Fans Of: ISIS, Gojira, Meshuggah, Neurosis
Listen to: “The Silent Man,” then listen to the rest of it.
