Charnia are a quartet (Seppe Batens, Thibaut Meiresonne-Keppens, Diederik Van Eetvelde, and Jelle Pieters) from the Waasland-region, Belgium, formed in 2012. They built quite some impressive live reputation, yet for this debut we had to wait two years. But no tears anymore, for now we can enjoy the first studio recording, Dageraad (Dutch for ‘dawn’ or ‘daybreak’). The album was recorded by Tony Vandenbempt, mixed by Gregory Simons and Ewaud Van Eetvelde, and mastered at Electric Blue Studio with Brian Wenckebach.
Dageraad consists of five tracks, performed in Flemish (Dutch). The album opens with the shortest track (four minutes of length) Daknam, called after a small village in the South of the Waasland. It is a minimal and droning, long-stretched intro with an ominous sound. And the scary atmosphere created here goes on when Charnia bring the core of their Aural Art. As from Waeslandwolf (‘wolf of Waesland’; waesland, with ae, is the old-Flemish name for waasland, with aa, by the way), the band brings a grandiose mixture of sober parts and distorted extremity. The song starts with an ultra-heavy riff, a colossal rhythm, doomed by hysterical, deep-throated screams. The main tempo is mid-paced and hammering, with some extremely doomy pieces (Doom-Death Metal comes to mind, especially within the riff melodies). After a while, the track turns into an integer and calm intermezzo, semi-acoustic and very hypnotic, before finally turning once again into overwhelming, breath-catching Sludge. Het Dodenhuis (‘the ossuary’) is comparable. The epic track mixes a deep-emotional execution with technical craftsmanship. The first half stands for grandiose, slowed-down Doom / Sludge, before transforming into an Ambient-laden piece of post-dimensional dreamscapes translated in a sonic creation. Zielsondergang (‘ruin of the soul’) begins with a trippy part, rather Trance / Alternative / Post-Rock oriented, but it includes those massive sludgy outbursts throughout the whole song. With its sixteen minutes, the last song, the title track, is the longest one (and the only one clocking over ten minutes). The tension of this song slowly builds up, and the dark-atmospheric intro works both paralysing and ecstatic. The middle-piece works erotically attractive (seen from aural point of view), with its Prog-meet-Baker-attitude. But it takes eleven minutes before the track turns sludgy. It sounds like a tsunami of sound, though it does not last for a couple of minutes. Then Dageraad once again turns into soft-droning ambience; it could have been created by Dehn Sora…
Anyway, this stuff is highly recommended if you appreciate the likes of Amenra, Church Of Ra, Syndrome, Aidan Baker, Treha Sektori or Consouling Sounds in general.