Solar Dawn - Equinoctium

*=Staff's pick	Deicidal Beliefs* Punished By Silence Spellbinder* Deep In Mourning Artistic Blashpemy Vulturous Need Broken-Winged* Autumns

Genre	Death Metal	Christian Älvestam	Vocals
Tracks	8	Anders Edlund	Guitar
Runningtime	35 Min.	Andreas Månsson	Guitar
Label	Might Music	Christian Älvestam	Bass
Release	18 March 2002	Henrik Schönström	Drums
Country	Sweden	-	Keyboards
Similar artists	Mercenary, At the Gates

Solar Dawn (ex-Jarawynja) was formed back in 1997. In 1998 a demo, called The Festival of Fools was recorded with Christian Älvestam of Unmoored on session vocals, and shortly after the recording Christian joined the band on a more permanent basis.

And I must say that it's the vocals that impresses me most on this album. You can find obvious similarities with The Haunted and Opeth in the growling and dark area - clean, powerful vocals with pondus, and a certain likeness to Dan Swanö in the clean vocals parts.

This is very good midtempo, melodic death metal with a very distinct swedish touch to it - tight powerful riffs with good harmonies throughout the album, and there is no mistake to be made when it comes to tell where this has been made - but it is not really rising above anything else that Sweden has to offer in this area.
It's pretty much standard, and made from the books - but since the standard of todays metal from Sweden is very high, this is still very good.

This is more based on bonecrushing, heavy riffs than harmonies and melodies, so this should appeal to fans of At the Gates to take an example, even though it is far from that fast.
But when they crank up the tempo a few levels, it's still just as good - like in Broken-Winged, which also contains slow parts with clean vocals.
It's in these moments they reveal that there are good musicians responsable for this release.

The production goes without remarks, and there are not much else to expect since it is all recorded and mixed at Abyss Studio by Tommy Tägtgren - that is a combination that promises high quality productions.

A noticable thing is that the album clocks in at the mediocre amount of 35 minutes - I think that is almost unacceptable low.
These guys have the potential to at least offer us 2 songs more for the money - there are no fill-out spots on the cd as it is, so I am positive they could have come up with a bit more material for the fans.
Or are they holding back the goodies for the next album? Cause it feels like there are much more behind this than what we hear here.....

Recommended - as Sweden here once again proves that they do death metal better than most others.

Production	Vocals	Compositions
8,5	8,5	7

Summary
7,5 chalices of 10 - Tommy