You may remember from a couple of lists ago that I was going off about how awesome I thought the early discs were from an enigmatic US metal project called Dawnbringer, a studio-only band that started off as one guy's one-man black metal band, morphed into a full band and released a couple of albums, and then turned back into a one-man band again, but this time operated by a totally different guy! Originally the brainchild of John Weston, Dawnbringer has since been handed over to one Chris Black, an occasional contributor to Metal Maniacs magazine and a former member of Nachtmystium, power metallers Pharoaoh, and scuzz-metal band Superchrist. Both the Sacrament and Unbleed CDs that we're now stocking at Crucial Blast delivered an epic, highly melodic and increasingly quirky fusion of black metal, classic 80's style heavy metal, and prog rock - very cool stuff, really catchy but undeniably METAL to the core. Well, Dawnbringer's back, with the project's first new album in seven years. Yep, the last Dawnbringer release was 2000's Catharisis Instinct (which has been out of print and which I still haven't heard), and somewhere along the line has turned into a godly blackened prog-metal machine capable of producing some of the catchiest trad metal tuneage I've heard in ages. This album RULES, for real - featuring a dark, moody album cover depicting a photograph of who I presume is Black along with a booklet full of weird artwork consisting of monstrous figures, images of clocks and doors, and geometric shapes, In Sickness And In Dreams reveals itself as a cryptic metal communique straight from the cortex of Black's epic visions; the disc is almost episodic in how the album's fourteen songs are connected together, almost all of them fall under two minutes in length, and songs flow back and forth into each other which ultimately gives In Sickness And In Dreams the feel of a single epic piece. And these tunes are KILLER, even better than Dawnbringer's terrific Unbleed (which I still think is one of the best neo-"trad" metal albums I own!), fusing incredible hooks and twin axe harmonies on par with the best that the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal had to offer with some scorching Scandinavian blackthrash influence, and vicious black metal trances that remind me of Thralldom. This stuff is SO catchy and weird, striking a perfect balance between the awesome melodic shredding (courtesy of Matt Johnsen, who is the only other person besides Black to contribute to the album) and the Maiden-meets-Dissection blackened thrash fury, and the weird vocal choral parts and King Diamond-esque wailing, sections where a song suddenly just stops and turns into a spacey, synth-backed acoustic jam, parts where a song just abruptly stops, period, and other odd twists and turns. I can't get enough of this disc - it makes me think of Blue Oyster Cult and blackened power metal, Mayhem and Judas Priest, all at the same time. An amazing, super catchy, terminally ferocious genre defying metal attack!