Autumn's Dawn – We Lost Our Hope Along The Way

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5.5

• Band:
  Autumn's Dawn
• Duration: 00:42:57
• Available from: 28/03/2025
• Label:

• Avantgarde Music

Streaming not yet available

The Australian project Autumn's Dawn – formed by Tim Yatras (Austere, German) and Matthew Bell (Tjaktjadálvve, Skuggor) – returns after five years with “We Lost Our Hope Along the Way”, an album that continues along the path traced by the two previous works and that seems to be in a hypothetical cross between the two aforementioned chapters, mixing the compactness and mixing the compactness and compactness, The pronounced depressive / alternative rock ambitions of the debut album with the greatest laying and the atmospheric black metal extraction phlegm of the second, for a disc that alternates liveliness and reflection, clean voices also very ringing and screening, agile and compact structures and more gloomy and ambient drifts.
Again, the reference points can be found in groups such as the old Lantlôs, Lifelover and Hereoir, to which the same austere and compatriots Woods of Desolation can be added, not to mention that some guitar incipit seems to come directly from an album such as “Last Fair Deal Gone Down” of the Katatonia, before the proposal then takes a more black metal turn.
One of the most problematic aspects of “We Lost Our Hope Along the Way” – as it had been for various portions of the previous works – is its fragmentary nature: even in this circumstance, the band seems suspended between several directions, not very lucid in linking its influences with consistency. If the most rock parties are sometimes too light and disconnected from the darkest and most dramatic context, even the Black Metal side struggles to emerge with a well -defined personality. It is a problem that is also found in groups such as the Hereoir themselves or – wanting to mention a more niche name for this musical current – the paragon of beauty, and which manifests itself in the form of a certain discontinuity in the narrative flow of the work.
At the productive level, the disc is solid and well -kept, but writing does not always prove to be up to the band's ambitions. The guitars build stratified and suggestive textures, however songwriting cannot fully support the emotional intensity suggested by the premises. Even the vocal performance of Sirrow, despite its movement of continuously between different registers, does not always manage to give depth to the most structured songs, revealing even before character when it is up to the clean to tow the song.
Ultimately, “We Lost Our Hope Along The Way” is not an album that lets itself be easily grasped: she lives with fragments, of suggestions that emerge and dissolve, holding on flashes of inspiration without being able to impose themselves continuously. It remains a job that could perhaps fascinate the nostalgics of certain dark metal sounds of the early 2000s, but which at the same time highlights limits in cohesion and compositional effectiveness. In short, the duo confirms its inclination towards a melancholy and stratified sound, but remains anchored to a formula that, instead of evolving, seems to repeat itself with some uncertainty too much.