A very individual demo comes from Portugal. The Astounding Dawn is the first ever release of the duo EMBRACING WINDS, which was founded in 2001. In musical matters they commit themselves to Ambient / Dark Metal.

Starting out with an intro or opening instrumental Secret Passage To The Main Gallery, where classic instruments like viola and cello dominate. In the background keyboard sounds flow in gently which partly create discreet disharmonies as a stylistic mean. At the end of this intro instrumental sounds like wind chimes with a slightly Asian touch appear and lead over directly to the first track This Magic Land. This song has to be the downer on this demo. But I would not call it a blackout. This Magic Land suffers from a lot of flaws: the production is totally crap, without any power. Keyboard-created soundscapes flow away literally and the singing of Margarida de Moura doesn’t want to fit at all, seems to be sort of out of place. The remnant like guitars and the rhythm section go down completely.
Much better it goes with the next track Transparent And Wild. Finally the production gets substance and the instruments sound much more differentiated. A song of mystical beauty. My personal favorite. And suddenly also the female singing harmonize with the arrangements almost perfectly. But at the end of this song modern Ambient tunes flow in and irritate the willing listener, because it doesn’t seem to fit to the more gothic-like and classic mystical main theme. Astounding Dawn follows these paths and knows how to convince with enchanting piano melodies and dramatic singing, spreading a dark melancholically atmosphere. In the meantime also guitars come into its own which have a typical Metal impact. Only the drums which obviously come from a computer can not set any accents as well as the bass. As it happens to all songs also Astounding Dawn merge to the next. But this time you can’t find much of a difference between this song and The Vision in the musical theme. Merely the keyboards move back into backgrounds a little bit more, so that guitars dominate.
The second part of this duo Pedro Oliveira is mainly responsible for instrumentation and programming. But sometimes he is to hear with recitatives. Last song Haunted Wind, instrumental or outro, gets another new touch with its medieval tunes.

Upshot: The Astounding Dawn is a well done and of all promising debut. Of course with a few deficiencies, especially in the production, but nothing what couldn't be solved in the future. The musical direction has something special and surely won’t go down between all these typical Gothic / Dark Metal / Ambient stuff which flood the market.

Embracing Winds