Cuckold's Boring Yawn - "Old Mornings Dawn" Review (0%)
Being the very worst black metal band in existence (also having the least talent in the black metal scene) and releasing the same album over and over ever since their debut Lugburz, Summoning still keep on going and releasing shit music all the time.
Summoning are unarguably the most over-rated and generic band in the genre and they should have split up already in 1995, that is before they even picked up their MIDI keyboards and pretended to be musicians despite never actually playing any instrument, and well before releasing that godawful album known as Lugburz.
What we have here with Old Mornings Dawn is another lame album from this lame attempt at modern black metal a.k.a Summoning.
Imagine Silencer if you replaced all the bits on Death - Pierce Me that weren't gay (all three of them) with riffs that My Chemical Romance threw out for sounding too effete. Old Mornings Dawn is mostly the same shit yourve been hearing from this band for almost two decades, just with someone tremolo picking deathcore/emo/djent riffs under gratuitous choir bits that sound like the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus, except less heterosexual and more noticeably affected by the AIDS pandemic.
This reminds me of Burzum insofar that you're meant to go to sleep listening to Burzum, though I don't think it was intentional in this case, and frankly the similarity ends there.
The album itself mistakes boredom for a somber and contemplative mood, and uses that confusion as its artistic guide, producing somnolent drone or dirge material that has no intensity, atmosphere, animating spark, nor does it have any point, cause or worldview that makes it in any way viable, much less unique.
Cuckold's Boring Yawn
Old Mornings Dawn is lame emo pretending to be symphonic black metal about as convincingly as 'unblack' metal pretending to be an actual musical genre, and both are arguably more convincing than Protector and Silenius pretending to be actual musicians.
Summoning itself is basically 'unblack' metal, with Tolkien's mythology in place of Christianity, but such a puerile substitution doesn't manage to conceal the effete fragility inherent to the fact that they play emo music. Just like 'Christian black metal', Summoning wants to turn black metal into preachy shoegaze/alt rock, complete with vocal driven verse-chorus pop structured songs that last over nine minutes despite containing at best 0.75 riffs.
Old Mornings Dawn is basically Watain if they played emo with crunkcore influences instead of emo with black metal influences, and by black metal influences, I mean they heard the last Dimmu Borgir album and weren't exposed to the level of testosterone that is necessary to explicate the difference between Abrahadabra and black metal that is actually good, so I guess what I'm saying is that Summoning is just Dimmu Borgir for people who listen to Watain.
This sounds like music written by and for the developmentally disabled, which is allegedly what the lyrical themes are about - 'Hobbits' being a psychological projection of Protector/Richard Lederer's 1m60 height and the resulting self-conscious trauma - but I honestly think that if either Elijah Wood or Peter Dinklage, being both about the same height as Lederer, saw these guys in real life they'd roll down their pants and piss on them both for being such talentless posers.
When I think about Austrians and developmental disabilities all I can really think of is a sped-helmet wearing version of Schwarzy eating Schnitzel on the set of Total Recall, except that for Protector and Silenius eating Schnitzel would be convincingly transgressive, not to mention a gastronomic improvement over their usual diet of soy and each other's semen.
To sum things up, Summoning is a down right dead dinosaur band and they suck by every stretch of imagination. They have no real talent, no passion, no originality and no potential at all.
Their music, be it on Old Mornings Dawn or elsewhere, has no meaning at all, the only thing Summoning's stuff can be used for is the soundtrack for a Disney themed roller coaster, or maybe for making more carnival music that is just as nonsensical as this album. There's nothing more to their songs than just being static noise produced by fake instruments that never goes anywhere and never develops past the first riff that is subsequently repeated for an entire nine minutes.
And no, Summoning are not 'true black metal'. Not for their genre and not for themselves. Summoning try so hard to play modern black metal but they pathetically fail at it, because their music is not black metal, it is emo. So they try to be something they are not... there is a word for this, which I believe to be 'poser'.
And not only do Summoning completely suck as 'musicians', what is really a concern is the fact that this band has been influential within the emo/screamo/symphonic 'metal' scenes. By making piece of shit music like this and calling it black metal, Summoning encourages thousands of other screamo bands to do the same, and soon enough it's the entire genres of emo/screamo/symphonic 'metal' that will call their music 'black metal' based on Summoning's delusions alone.
It has pretty much already taken place. It's Summoning's fault, alongside other emo/alt rock bands such as Dimmu Borgir, Watain, Liturgy, Deafheaven, Wolves in the Turd Room and Dark Funeral, that modern black metal has turned to shit.
And even once mighty bands such as Mayhem, Immortal and Emperor are turning to shit as well, not because they can't play good black metal anymore, but because they too want to 'expand' their audience to the uncharted territories of nu metal, emo, alt rock, shoegaze, and the rest of mainstream genres which each guarantee a constant influx of dumb, angsty, gullible, socially maladjusted 'metalheads' whose appreciation of metal begins and ends at how well it can resemble Bullet For My Valentine while still providing the 'cred' of listening to 'extreme music'.
I think that's the target demographic. That, and people who thought the themes and aesthetics of Cradle of Filth were actually deeply heterosexual.
Old Mornings Dawn score: 0/100.
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