Label: UDR Music
Production: Marcus Jidell
Release year: 2017
Album length: 52.52 min
Genre: Progressive Rock / Progressive Metal
Incredible. Soen, the Swedish band founded in 2010 by former Opeth drummer Martin Lopez, are slowly growing into one of the key entities of the prog-rock revival, and with one important fact on their side: they’ve managed to define a musical and artistic dossier all their own. Something that Opeth, after their chameleon-like transformation, honestly have a harder and harder time justifying with their new albums.
This effective ongoing “peddling” around the proving ground of Soen’s musical vision is simply confirmed by the excellent new album »Lykaia«. The album is a new manifesto of musical uncommonness, and its artistic appeal is also guaranteed by the occasional glimpses of “experimental eccentricity”. There are certainly still parallels to be drawn with Opeth, especially from the days of Lopez’s tenure with them (the spell of some guitar transitions in the song Opal, sections of the tracks Sectarian, Sister). But with their continued deepening of a self-grown art culture at the core of their songwriting, Soen are slowly becoming a prog-rock entity able to catch up with the statuses of Riverside, Porcupine Tree and Opeth (after the feminine transformation). The only question is whether Soen will ever reach the kind of popularity the bands listed enjoy.
»Lykaia« delivers a new package of exceptional compositions with highly infectious musicality that also boast complex arrangements, a bag full of mighty, solemn, highly vibrant moods gazing into melancholy and darkness, a feeling of spontaneous unfolding, or rather an unexpected development of the album, and superbly placed stretches of calm passages alternating with moments of punchy, catchy metal riffing. On the album as a whole, you can again sense that Soen are flirting mostly with mid-tempo song development, while in the atmospheric build-ups of the passages, the keyboards join the guitars as equals in building the soundscape. The album works like a really good opiate. It’s a psychedelic, “cerebral” and “trip-oid” album. While consuming it, it’s not hard to switch off the rational mind and freely surrender to sailing through the universe of this band’s distinctive musical language. The contrasts between the calm passages and the ones where a massive wall of guitars reigns, underpinned by the constantly exploratory, thrilling drum escapades of Martin Lopez, are once again extremely pronounced. The rhythms are progressively broken up, constantly teasing with a top-notch crop of improvisations, and in this way they stir up the momentum of dynamic development that is so outstanding on the album. Clearly perceptible here is the constantly tearing, rattling pulse of the penetrative bass guitar, and of course, above all this, the pure, melodic, authoritative, perpetually melancholic and, in its occasional soapy, sensual softness, incredibly invasive signature vocal, a constantly highly charismatic delivery from Joel Ekelof.
The band has grown into a quintet. Keyboards have become an integral part of the lineup, and a new guitarist, Marcus Jidell, has joined the team too. His name is a jaw-dropper, because the question instantly pops up: what the hell is a former Royal Hunt guitarist doing in the stylistically very different Soen? It’s like trying to marry a spider and a fly. But Jidell is an excellent replacement for Platzbarzdis. He’s fit superbly into the group’s new musical substance and essence, and stylistically the change at the guitar position is barely noticeable, if at all.
On the album »Lykaia«, Soen don’t offer anything new and unheard. They keep diligently gnawing at the musical leads of its predecessor »Tellurian«, and in that respect they effectively nurture and build on the artistic and expressive reach of the previous album. The feeling is that the arrangements are a touch looser, more fragmented, even more varied in prog-rock terms, although the massive wall of sound built on voluminous, wrecking-ball riffing is as genuine as ever this time too. The general feeling is still that »Lykaia« sounds a touch “softer” than its predecessor, thanks to the additionally stretched-out and progressively even more fragmented arrangements.
The look of the song Lucidity bugs me a bit. The funny thing is that Soen shot a promo video for it and picked it as the new album’s promotional single, even though with that move the band actually did itself a thankless disservice. Why? The song is in itself an extremely beautiful, dreamy, melancholically yearning dirge, but it bothers me with its resemblance to what David Gilmour made on his solo albums (the lead vocal melodies pull toward something Gilmour could have used on his album »On An Island«). At this point the psychedelic aesthetic of the album rises, but the whole thing can also rattle connoisseurs of Pink Floyd. If I stay a bit snarky for the rest of these lines, David Gilmour today can only dream of the inspiration to create a composition like Lucidity (complete with Jidell’s striking solo in the second half). The parallels with Gilmour, at the expense of Jidell’s guitar soloing, repeat in the middle instrumental passage of the song Paragon (don’t get me wrong, that solo fits the composition perfectly).
So, what was written at the end of the review of the predecessor »Tellurian« can be loudly repeated once more. »Lykaia« is yet another gorgeous album, full of polished melodies that are ambitiously, experimentally loosened up with the exploratory value of progressively and technically complex musical figures. This approach will surely thrill all the music purists and gourmands among you who are looking for musical perfection, uncommon expression and the appeal of artistic provocation.
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
rating: 8.5 / 10
Tracklist:
01. Sectarian
02. Orison
03. Lucidity
04. Opal
05. Jinn
06. Sister
07. Stray
08. Paragon
09. Gods Acre
10. Vitriol
Lineup:
Joel Ekelöf – vocals
Lars Åhlund – guitar, keyboards
Marcus Jidell – guitar
Stefan Senberg – bass guitar
Martin Lopez – drums
