Cassius King
Dread the Dawn

I would definitely dread the dawn if the soundtrack was Cassius King’s second album Dread the Dawn, not only does it look very generic it sounds generic as well. I read about Dan Lorenzo who is claimed by the press sheet writer to be the best in the world at writing “true-to-life” riffs, they cite unnamed sources as the trade press having claimed this. I can’t recall that I ever read something like that, or wrote, but then again; who the hell is Dan Lorenzo? Another guitarist as far as I can see, has a singer from Watchtower and a drummer who once was in Overkill, things that would seem to be good ingredients for a tasty treat, but isn’t.

It is generic Stoner Rock with riffs that number fifteen a dozen, I guess Lorenzo had a bad day riffing and writing riffs for this one. The vocals are the same, very typical stoner vocals. In fact, everything sounds like any Stoner albums, you can replace the three similar with bands of choice in the stoner genre, and perhaps some more doomy ones as well. They stroke wide to catch as much as possible, and hence become as generic as possible. And it seems like they have never heard about the concept of variation as the tracks just blend together into thick paste that you bake in the oven and get a tasteless generic pastry, and on top of the tastelessness, it takes way too long to do it as well.

I would claim that this album is anything but brilliant, it might not be awful or terrible. There is even a slight chance that fans of the stoner or even doom style of music will like it, a slight one, but a chance nonetheless. But even so, it is an album that is destined to be fast forgotten, thrown in the bin, or neglected; most reviews I read was quite negative, but there was actually one very positive, so I have to be somewhat open I suppose. Still, the recycled riffs are quite boring, the vocals are uninteresting, the songs are generic and tired, everything about this album lacks the power and energy that makes stoner rock great – this is just a pale, tired, sad, and generic attempt at making something out of the completely generic – quite a failure.

HHHHHHH