A very immersive and beautiful atmospheric post-BM / blackgaze recording, "... In the Dawn" is the debut work of Coldawn whose two members hail from Australia and Venezuela. The project has actually been in existence since 2013 under original name Beyond the Dawn but it's only just recently after the name change and personnel changes as well that its musical efforts have borne fruit. Very pleasant and melodic fruit it is too: like a lot of post-BM / blackgaze music, Coldawn's sound features plenty of melancholy but also a layer of bright tones and noise wash suggesting that behind every dark cloud there lurks a silver lining of hope and optimism. Lovely liquid acoustic guitar melodies and equally crystalline piano flow side by side with harsh wintry tremolo guitar scourge under a filmy treatment that blankets most tracks with a gentle glowing ambience.

After an extended acoustic-strings instrumental in the intro track, the duo swings into the first proper song "My Escape", which is actually quite a nice and soothing piece in parts, not really menacing, even though the thin ghost vocals sound death-rattle skeletal enough and there's enough fizzle acid shower guitar to dissolve ... well, OK, a very small collection of coins in its four-plus minutes rather than a whole truckload of shrapnel. The melodies on this and the following tracks "The Essence" and "Only Moments" are not really anything out of the ordinary - if anything, they sound very much like a soundtrack from some old romantic Hollywood film made half a century ago - which might explain why the music isn't very aggressive in spite of its harsh sounds; but they do evoke very strong impressions of times long gone by. The percussion can be robust and energetic though the sound of the drums tends to be more flippy than powerful.

"La primavera no llegará esta vez" introduces spoken Spanish-language phrases in a youthful female voice and a layer of space-ambient tones which give the music a more cosmic touch and an uplifting spiritual quality. The title track combines a broody piano solo with explosive post-metal featuring spiky guitar, more flippy drumming and guttural roar that span an emotional range of desolation to hope and depressive downfall.

The songs are all very lovely and expressive, and come across like audio impressionist paintings ... but funnily none of them really stands out in emotion or intensity/ It's as if Coldawn know all the right buttons to push and all the right melodies and riffs to play, and yet they seem to hold back on pouring in all their heart and soul into the music. The result is that you can sit through the whole album and nod, yes, this is all very good - but shouldn't there have been something that really sweeps listeners away into a blackgaze universe and leaves them there long after the last note has played and gone?