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“It’s time for new tales of resistance!” is a hell of a way to open an album, but in Dawn Ray’d’s case the bravado is warranted. “Raise the Flails,” the string-speckled opening salvo on the Northern UK trio’s sophomore album, Behold Sedition Plainsong, is more of a warning than anything. When vocalist and violinist Simor Barr lets loose his mighty roar and lays out the bones of this latest manifesto, it’s hard not to feel a shiver of excitement (or dread) run up one’s spine.
This is a wild, powerful modern black metal record steeped in the language of revolution, and executed with the deadly precision of a battle-hardened firing squad. Melodic, aggressive, and heavy in all the right places (“Until the Forge Goes Cold” provides a masterclass in dynamic tension), Behold Sedition Plainsong is a brilliant piece of militant propaganda, designed to delight and inflame in equal measure. Its canny blend of epic black metal, winding folk melodies, and even funereal doom (as on “Soon Will Be the Age of Lessons Learnt,” which at certain moments sounds all the world like a cleaned-up Thou) is as refreshing as it is compelling, offering a thoroughly modern take on the genre while at times harkening back to the great old 90s folk black metal bands (but mercifully devoid of any cryptofascist heathen underpinnings).
Dawn Ray’d is a unique property in a genre flush with tired dogma, hokey theatrical bluster, and sly cryptofascist signaling, and the attention they’ve raked in as modern black metal’s premier anarchist standard-bearers is a breath of fresh air amidst cloying clouds of rot. It’s in that way they channel their venerable UK predecessors by exemplifying the Bolt Thrower creed: in a world of compromise, some don’t. This violin-powered, often grandiose black metal trio, with its roots in the industrial North of a politically-fractured island and its black flag flying high, have been on the vanguard of a new kind of metal resistance—and that influence is spreading.
Over the past several years, as the rise of global fascism has emboldened dotted cesspools of fascist scum and energized a new generation of radicals, the world of heavy metal has reacted in two ways—first, in the new wave of antifascist extreme metal has increasingly made its presence known, and secondly, in an upswing in reactionary or outright fascist elements rearing their ugly heads and caterwauling in defense of “keeping metal dangerous” (Never mind that most of the revered Second Wave black metal bands were founded in liberal social democratic Nordic countries and made up of spotty proto-edgelord teenagers practicing in government-subsidized studios).
Dawn Ray’d's contributions here cannot be understated. The very fact that a vocally, proudly antifascist band—let alone with one with an explicitly working class anarchist politic— has been invited to spread their message on some of metal’s biggest stages and been covered positively in all manner of publications (metal-focused and otherwise) continues to be a source of amazement. And, for those of us who came of age during a time when getting many metal fans to care even a little bit about injustice seemed like an insurmountable feat, it feels downright miraculous. It is even more satisfying to note that, politics aside, the quality of their compositions, musicianship, and songwriting have remained utterly top-tier; I cannot fathom why one would want to ignore a message like theirs, but if needs must, there is plenty for the alleged “apolitical” metalhead to appreciate here. One of Dawn Ray’d's greatest strengths has been their ability to write undeniably excellent black metal songs, and this sophomore effort is no exception; I’d challenge any black metal aficionado to stick on “To All, To All, To All!”— a blistering screed against wage slavery—and find fault with its icy melodic core, merciless blasts, or medieval-sounding folk passages torn straight from the Windir playbook, or for that matter, with the feral, melancholic roar of “Salvation Rite.”
Lest one assume that the album is a joyless manifesto punctuated by blastbeats, rest assured that there is still hope to be found among the ashes. Extreme metal has a long history of building power from below, and it’s that exact political strategy that will lead us out of perdition. As Dawn Ray’d ask plainly on “A Time for Courage at the Borderlands,” a smoldering folk-inflected elegiac for the refugees left to die at arbitrary settler-colonial borders,
What if all it took
To help get people through
Was someone else who could resist
What if that was you?
What if it was all of us? Imagine what a better world we could build.