ABYSMAL DAWN — Leveling the Plane of Existence (review)

ABYSMAL DAWN — Leveling the Plane of Existence album cover

Album · 2011 · Death Metal

4.5/5 · 2011-02-06
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Leveling the Plane of Existence is the third full-length album from US Death Metal act Abysmal Dawn, released in 2011 and containing just under forty minutes of music over its ten tracks, two of which are instrumentals.

The album begins with the haunting piano led piece The Age of Ruin which serves as an introduction that sounds designed to lull the listener into a false sense of security before the band kicks things into full on death metal with Pixilated Ignorance. Songs like this serve as the staple of the Abysmal Dawn sound. The death vocals are strong, the guitars are intense with enough melody to keep the music from sounding like a blur of brutality. But it is a fair assessment to say that Abysmal Dawn as a band don’t bring anything new to the table. Their music is pretty much your typical generic death metal but there is one important factor to consider with Abysmal Dawn, what they do, they do really well, and Leveling the Plane of Existence is no exception in a run of high quality death metal studio releases.

The album’s first highlight is In Service of Time. The guitars have great groove to them here that fit well with the vocals. It’s still generic but its songs such as this one that make Abysmal Dawn’s Leveling the Plane of Existence such a solid death metal release that in my opinion is well worth fans of the style checking out.

The pace is kept up through to Rapture Renowned which features some really great lead guitar and is another of my highlights. After this we get the album’s shortest track, Our Primitive Nature, at just fifty-six seconds long is pretty much just an interlude, but what a curveball of an interlude! The sound here is like some sort of tribal drumming which then bursts straight into our next actual song, which is Perpetual Dormancy. The title track follows on from this one and is another of my highlights from Leveling The Plane of Existence. This track has everything that I feel makes a death metal song really great.

The quality is kept up throughout the album though, and its overall length is ideal considering that deep down this is nothing new. Any longer I feel that the album could drag on a bit, but they’ve found the right sort of length to make it work to its best effect. They save a big surprise for last though, because The Sleeper Awakens features a much slower pace, clean guitars and less in your face vocal delivery which sounds more akin to black metal than death metal. This is the album’s longest track and features the most variety in the music out of everything on offer here. It’s also one of my highlights because it’s different to all the other songs, and proves that deep down Abysmal Dawn may not be the one trick pony that most of Leveling the Plane of Existence makes them out to be, instrumentals aside. Overall I think I’d have liked them to showcase this perhaps a bit more on the album because for the most part this is very formulated, and despite their incredible strengths as a band I do think that they’ve going to have to eventually re-think their game if they are to be given more of the time of day. This album fully deserves the score I’m giving it, but in a world where people have limited time and money, I can’t actually give any further justification as to why this is worth it.

(Review originally written for Heavy Metal Haven)