In the popular mind, the front man of a rock band—the one who sings and in many cases writes the songs—is greedy for attention, drawn to the spotlight like a moth in leather pants. In the world of underground metal, though, it’s the opposite that’s often true. Many bands never play live, sometimes because their “front men” are the only members—California’s Xasthur, for instance, or Tasmania’s Striborg.
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Dawnbringer has almost no Web presence—just a placeholder Facebook page with no music or photos—and no plans to throw a release party for Nucleus. The band’s current label, the forward-looking Canadian imprint Profound Lore, tactfully refers to Black in press materials as “elusive.”
But hard-core metal fans, like crate diggers in other genres, thrive on obscurity—the harder it is to learn about a great band, the more treasured the find. And Dawnbringer, despite never touring, has attracted some well-placed admirers. Brandon Stosuy, who lives in New York and blogs about metal for Stereogum, thinks fans of old-school metal would “worship” Dawnbringer if the band were better known. “Virtuosic traditionalists like Chris Black and Slough Feg’s Mike Scalzi . . . are our contemporary Priests and Maidens,” he says. And Cosmo Lee, who lives in LA and runs the respected metal blog Invisible Oranges, has written that Nucleus will be one of his top five albums of the year.
Black traces much of the sound of Nucleus to what he calls a “boom of underground metal in Europe in the 1990s.” He’s not shy about his love for New Wave of British Heavy Metal acts like Iron Maiden, whose soaring, strongly melodic songs used clean vocals, articulate and frequently blues-based guitar parts, and driving but not inhospitably fast tempos. Around the time he started Dawnbringer, groups like Edge of Sanity, In the Woods . . . , and especially Katatonia were building on that style, and to Black (and many others) their efforts pointed up a slump in the American scene, then dominated by death metal and widely reviled subgenres like nu-metal and groove metal. “A lot of the melody went away,” he says. “It got really dumbed down. It went from being kind of this heroic thing to just being all about ‘respect’ and whatever fuckin’ Phil Anselmo said.”
