So in a way, 'My Next Dawn' is a new beginning for Tenebrae, but one with past experiences and a wide musical background. In a way, this album feels like the band still wants to hold on to the "art" of making music, which obviously is a good thing. The music on this album is well varied, contains plenty of synths and both clean vocals and death growls. The band wants to tell a story and put a lot of effort in doing so.
That results in strong yet emotional metal songs with fingerlicking doom riffs and brutal death metal passages. The clean vocals also give the whole thing a power metal edge, which is nice. Bands that come to mind, include Amorphis, Anathema, Septicflesh, Swallow The Sun and November's Doom, which I think is a pretty damn good set of names to be compared with. Then there are the sometimes "gothic" keyboards, giving this album such a great nineties sound.
Picking out a favorite song isn't really easy, mostly because the album truly feels like a concept. However, I noticed that I'm exceptionally fond of 'The Fallen Ones', an epic piece of death doom. Here, the Swedish death metal scene also comes shining through, you know, In Flames and company. Another stunning epos is 'Lillian (Changing Shades)' and my third favorite could be 'Black Drape' but the jury is still deliberating on that.
Fans of atmospheric metal can blindly trust Tenebrae to deliver the goods, that's for sure. So it's no wonder I recommend this album to all fans of the aformentioned bands. Defintiely not bad for a band that once started out as a cover band named Why Not. Check it out, you just might have discovered a new favorite to get you through the cold days of winter...
Serge