I really hate writing reviews of albums that I find just ‘average’. There’s just nothing to say, whether it be good or bad. It’s easy to blather on about an album you absolutely love, and it’s also really easy to trash and pick apart the worst ones. With that said, here’s Before the Dawn’s Deadlight, a middle of the road melodic death album that reminds of a less aggressive Dark Tranquillity…

…and there lies one of it’s biggest faults – if Deadlight had some more oomph, a little more hitting power, it could have been a slightly better album, but as it is, it does nothing for me. The other major detractor is of course, the over saturated genre choice. Melodic death is chock-full of releases just like this that have no real identifying traits to set them apart from the pack. Usually I’m not one to dog on a band for lacking originality – any number of thrash bands can sound like any number of other thrash bands and it wouldn’t bother me much – the difference lies with the execution and how it’s presented, which brings us back to the lack of aggression thing.

The songs themselves are well constructed, and there’s a considerable amount of clean vocals tossed into the mix to help diversify things, but unfortunately it’s not enough to make it memorable – it just tastes like vanilla.

Deadlight is not a bad album, but it’s certainly not a good one either – there’s just too many other albums out there in the genre just like it. I’m sure there are some melodic death enthusiasts out there that will and do like it, but then again, I’ve always thought of myself to be one such enthusiast and just couldn’t get into it.

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