Graven Dusk are a Canadian one-man project, courtesy of Yves Allaire aka Evil Lair. He’s also the guy involved with the Epic Doom-act Dark Covenant (with two former members of Malleus Maleficarum) and frontman of Nordicwinter (still active???), and formerly sole member of orchestral Black projects Strigoi Mort and Azkiria as well. The album this review deals with is the sole album under the Graven Dusk moniker till now. It was originally recorded in 2006 and appears now in a re-mastered edition via Russian top-label Kunsthauch. [I think Black Plague re-issued this stuff too in 2010, but that’s of no importance right here…]
The six hymns on Graven Dusk last for about forty three minutes and are pretty characteristic for the label, i.e. rather slow, ambient, funereal and atmospheric Black / Doom Metal veiled in a post-dimensional mist. Graven Dusk opens with In A Dismal Mist, which starts with church bells, a neo-symphonic piano-tune and atmospheric keyboard lines at the back ground. One would expect a Symphonic or Gothic recording, but when the sphere gets more grim and cold (when the drums join at first), it seems to go the other way. After two minutes, the first slow, back-grounded guitars and deep, distant growls enter. As from now on I’m sure: this will make me happily unhappy! And indeed, that’s what the core of this album stands for: freezing and melancholic, slow and down-tuned Funeral Doom / Doom-Death / Ambient Black Metal with a subtle touch of Neo-Classical and Symphonic emotionality.
The keyboards and piano are pretty important throughout the whole journey, for defining the general atmosphere on the album. So are the grunts, which are, as said before, of the eerie, distant kind, but I think the most characterising surplus must be the autumnal, deeply-melancholic atmosphere. Brings me to the sound, which fits perfectly to this material: slightly dungeon’ish yet refined. It is incredible how every single detail fits. Once again it cannot be otherwise but being a solo-project, but once again this release proves that a sole entity is capable more than once, more than just coincidental, to create such oppressive, abyssal, hypnotic and deep-atmospheric hymns.
Mathematic-aural question (ever heard of it?): what would / could be the greatest common divisor of Evoken, early Burzum, Wrong, Tempestuous fall, Thrall and Beyond Black Void?...