Label: Metalville Records
Release date: April 30, 2021
Production: Simone Mularoni (DGM)
Album length: 58.56 min.
Genre: Progressive Metal
Rating: 10/10
Poverty’s No Crime are a German prog metal band who hopped on the train of the lively progressive metal scene sparked by the arrival of Dream Theater way back in 1991. By the mid-nineties, Symphony X, Angra, Vanden Plas and Threshold, to name just four that spring to mind right now, had already put out their debuts. Poverty’s No Crime had theirs too. And more. By 2003, their hard work had piled up five studio albums. Yet with all that activity, much like their equally phenomenal countrymen Vanden Plas, they only reached a handful of fanatical music gourmets. But this “curse” haunts quite a few similar bands that are excellent and, at the same time, a “strictly guarded” musical secret. That’s the typical story of Poverty’s No Crime’s career.
The band has always delivered top-quality music, channeling most of their creative energy into chasing highly vibrant moods and ultra-musical catchiness, while skillfully keeping the technically complex escapades and virtuoso showpieces in balance (and at arm’s length too). They never overdid it.
“A Secret To Hide” is their eighth studio album and lands five years after the excellent “Spiral Of Fear”, which, up to its release in 2016, was their most vivid and polished work. That one bridged a long stretch of creative dormancy, nine years, that the band needed to put out a new studio album. We waited a long time for this one too, since with Poverty’s No Crime everything has obviously been moving very slowly from 2007 onward. But it’s worth the wait. “A Secret To Hide” proves it once again.
Frankly, considering the band’s artistic path so far, “A Secret To Hide” is their most mature, finished and fully realized studio album, and in that it tops even its excellent predecessor. On the new record the band delivers substance that keeps grabbing you and pulling you in with high drama theater, or melancholic bombast (the song Within the Veil is the absolute winner in the melancholy category). The album serves up a run of wonderfully cunning combinations of catchy phrases and musical melodies that hook you instantly and crank up the dynamic flow of events on the record. We’re talking about progressive metal that grabs you right away. That rarely happens, and to pull it off you usually have to be a certain kind of artistic oddball. And Poverty’s No Crime are exactly those oddballs. They’ve got that thing of discovering, unveiling and exploring in their own way. They dare. They even dare to not give a damn about trends or about trying to please anyone. They create what they feel and write music first and foremost for themselves. That’s the heart of it.
Schizophrenic is the album’s darkest song. The band doesn’t skimp on a Hammond-organ-imitating sound, and it doesn’t shy away from the guitar “talk box” either, which makes the intro downright eerie. Like Bruce Dickinson put it together in the era of “The Chemical Wedding” (the intro only!). It’s a special experience to follow the song’s development, the build-up of moods, and then the crescendo into a phenomenally melodic chorus (and that’s not the only such case on the album). With this record, Poverty’s No Crime have definitely become true masters of their craft. The superb closing part, the ten-minute-plus top-shelf progressive metal piece In the Shade, puts the dot on the “i”. The band takes a full three minutes to get to the chorus, but just with the transitions from verse to pre-chorus and the brilliantly slipped-in bits along the way, it manages to lure the listener into tensely following the song unfold. The chorus then completely discharges that tension with its ultra-musical catchiness. It’s as if pure white light suddenly broke through the gloomy atmosphere of steel-gray clouds. The album’s opening is just as strong and distinctive. Very similar to the ending, or the other way around. The brilliant opener Supernatural lays out the entire musical substance of this 30-year-old band in one place in an instant, and right behind it comes Hollow Phrases, which will appeal even to all of you who can’t stand prog metal because it’s “technically overcooked”. Hollow Phrases is one of the catchiest compositions Poverty’s No Crime have written in their career, and it could be spinning anywhere at any moment, radio Aktual and Veseljak aside. Under the hypothesis that progressive metal were ever mainstream, Hollow Phrases would be on non-stop radio rotation with feather-light ease. Within the Veil, though, is breathing right down its neck. And here’s another detour on the album: the excellent instrumental The Great Escape, where you realize these guys grew up listening to Rush (especially the eighties).
Sadly, “A Secret To Hide” will once again be discovered and listened to by only a few, because Poverty’s No Crime are a band whose members make a living in everyday life with anything but music. These are modest guys who write phenomenal music. And they stay modest. It’s an exceptional mirror of greatness that plenty of people could learn from. “A Secret To Hide” is a work of great perfection, of musically endlessly fascinating artistry, where the red thread of tangible creativity never runs out, and which enchants with how it finds a brilliant balance between gripping musicality, bombastic atmosphere and subtly tucked-in, technically complex kineticism. All of this results in an exceptionally supple musical dossier of absolutely unique artistry.
In a way, the wheel of fate has brought Poverty’s No Crime closer with this album to similarly overlooked bands, a group that, alongside their countrymen Vanden Plas, can easily include Britain’s Threshold or even Arena. Although we’re talking strictly about a German approach to progressive metal, so it’s not wise to mix apples and oranges too much, I’ll still add a passing reference point for those who don’t know the band: “Judged by thumb”, the whole thing sounds like Vanden Plas trying to sound like Threshold or post-millennium Arena. Well, maybe it’s not such a silly association, though the band wouldn’t like it one bit.
The album is steeped in extraordinary melancholy and longing. Volker Walsemann’s vocals are once again a brilliant conversation partner for the listener and a very important creator of magic. Yes. We’re talking about the creation of magic, and more. Mystique. You have to keep in mind that the band has had an unchanged lineup since 2001 and that three members have been together since 1991, right up to today. That’s mileage that says something about how well they know each other and sense each other creatively. With “A Secret To Hide”, Poverty’s No Crime have polished their artistry to perfection. With the release of their eighth album, these (modest) guys truly celebrated 30 years of activity in high style. When nobody can take away your wholehearted passion. And that heart is an immeasurable (intangible) wealth, the only thing that fulfills and quenches the restlessness of the soul in all of us, the “eternally wandering”. That’s exactly what this record radiates. It’s an incredible blend of tradition and insight that only the phenomenon of progressive musical genres can offer again and again. Of marching forward artistically.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. Supernatural
2. Hollow Phrases
3. Flesh And Bone
4. Grey To Green
5. Within The Veil
6. The Great Escape
7. Schizophrenic
8. In The Shade
Lineup:
Volker Walsemann – vocals, guitar
Marco Ahrens – guitar
Jörg Springub – keyboards
Heiko Spaarmann – bass guitar
Andreas “Theo” Tegeler – drums
