Album Review: The Sonic Dawn - Eclipse

Time continues its never-ending march forward, and yet it seems that society has never spent more time looking backwards. Whether we're talking about the constant stream of old movies and tv shows that are being brought back to life, or styles of music that were once left behind, the past never truly dies anymore. We might choose to focus on different periods, but the punctuation now leaves the story open to continue at any time. The Sonic Dawn are one of the bands that shuns the present, and doesn't care about the future. They came with a recommendation for fans of Graveyard, which was enough to get me to give them a listen. I haven't found them yet, but if there's another vintage sounding rock band out there with that kind of potential, I want to be there to find them.

That recommendation turns out to not be the most accurate. While "Eclipse" is certainly mired firmly in the past, right down to being recorded to tape and vinyl, The Sonic Dawn is drawing from the psychedelic rock of the 60s, whereas Graveyard spins on the hard rock of the early 70s. It might not sound like the biggest chasm, but there is a big and audible difference between the two approaches.

The record opens with "Forever 1969", which sums up the band's attitude, and follows in a pattern. There is another album I recently reviewed that contained a song titled "1974", which waxed nostalgic for that time, and there was a song on a record I dearly loved a while back called "1985", which did the same thing. I feel like the conceit is too easy, and too blunt, to be effective. And when the band obviously wasn't alive at the time they're singing about, it also rings hollow, like throwing a penny into an empty dumpster.

I'll say this, though. The Sonic Dawn are able to capture the sound of late 60s psych rock very well. From the tones of the instruments, to the slight haze that permeates the production like a layer of dust on the recording tape, you could easily be fooled into thinking this record was recorded back in the day. There's a whole industry now centered on bands that are doing this, which I don't quite get. Vinyl is a terrible format that requires a recording to be abused in order to keep the needle in the groove. Why would we want to sound like that, when we can have perfect reproduction of the sound a band can create? Obviously, a lot of people have gotten confused, and associate the sonics of records from the past with the quality of the music they contained. The records were great in spite of the production limitations, not because of them.

And like many of these vintage style bands, The Sonic Dawn fall into that category where they pour so much of themselves into getting the sound just right that they don't give the same attention to the songs. These are compositions that set feelings and moods, and give us little in the way of guitar licks or vocal lines to grab hold of. Everything here is rather ethereal, floating by and leaving no mark. You know how you can spray perfume in the air and walk through it, getting only the slightest hint of the scent? That's what this record feels like. You get the impression of music, but not the satisfaction.

As I'm writing this, The Zombies were just voted into the Rock & Roll Hall Of Fame. Listening to this record, I was thinking about "Odyssey & Oracle". That record had a similar sonic palate, but was full of songs that had interesting motifs and ideas, songs you would remember even if you didn't like them. "Eclipse", on the other hand, is like the styrofoam that better record would be packed in to be shipped to the stores. It has no identity of its own, and makes no statement about the talents of the band. As I said this sounds like a record that could have been released in 1969, I would also believe it was a record that has spent that long being ignored.

By now I should know that making vintage rock and roll is among the hardest things a band can try to do. Very few have ever done it well once, let alone repeatedly. Maybe The Sonic Dawn can do it sometime in the future, but they haven't done it here.