Artist: Haken
Label: Sensory Records
Release: 2011
Running time: 71:28
Rating: 5/5
Maybe it’s not in the spotlight for the masses, but it’s strong! The progressive music genre! Haken are one of those new bands that wipe away the boundaries of progressive music and its subgenres with feather-light ease. Of course, pigeonholing bands as sprawling and adventurously expressive as Haken is a hugely thankless and often unintentionally misleading move, but still. Sometimes a description just makes things simpler, giving a potential listener a handy idea of what a band sounds like. This time, describing the music with a single adjective falls far, far short.
Haken are Brits. “Visions” is their second album, which followed the debut with its official release just one year later. With the debut they managed to claim a spot on the spectrum of what progressive music has become today, a place on the musical globe defined by the band’s recognizable and unique approach.
“Visions” builds on and deepens the platform of that cornerstone Haken laid as a springboard with their debut “Aquarius” (2010), because with the new album Haken have sharpened their style even further across the individual traits of the debut. The chemistry, already running at an excellent working temperature, that has marked the communication between the band’s instrumentalists since the debut is turned up even more here. You can feel that the band is more mature in its arrangements, and there’s also an unavoidable journey, driven by the many-layered profiles of the band members, toward the subgenre-hopping variety of progressive music itself (whether in rock or metal territory, plus a dose of jazz). You can still occasionally feel that in their early days Haken looked up to Dream Theater, but those moments are placed so unobtrusively in the arrangements that, if anything, they add to the dynamism of the structures, the contrasting deepening and magnification of moods, and the (fluid, “painless”) motif jumps within the songs. The red thread with which they vehemently unspool their colorful ball of yarn never runs out. It’s precisely the closing title track that nods to this flirtation with Dream Theater. Without a shred of pretension, because the band breaks it up with its own, distinctly personal, shrewd seasoning of arrangements, topped off by the vocals coming into the song, with excellent ideas in how the verses are delivered, bordering on the drama-theater “circus act” that the singers of the British bands Genesis, Marillion or Arena create (or used to create) with their vocal performances. This is the kind of progressive metal/rock album that unfolds over a hefty 71 minutes of music with such flow, through so many twisting motif switches, that any fear of its running time getting boring is unnecessary. And that goes for the title track Visions too, the 22-minute progressive epic suite that is the album’s peak.
Haken are one of those bands that manage to deliver musical form extremely effectively through the unpredictability of events unfolding spontaneously on the album. And yet the music never loses focus. The fragmentation created by the complex structure of the arrangements never overpowers the principle of keeping the dynamic flow high, as the band sails with daring defiance through all kinds of genre approaches, masterfully bridging and fusing them in its own songwriting melting pot. They also get what a gradual build-up of atmosphere within individual parts of songs is all about. They pull off a masterful move like that, for instance, in the outro of Deathless, where, over a repeated motif in the closing section, they gradually stack layer upon layer of music into a final “crescendo”, and the esoteric feel itself brings this moment of the record close to elements of post rock.
Wound-up lead motifs, kitted out with “riff paneling”, logically give way in successive waves to calmer passages, where the band, through a formula of unpretentious splendor, “rides out” of emphatic guitar riffing toward magnifying new moods, thanks especially to the clever, insightful keyboard arrangements of many faces, as well as the vocal approach. These calm passages, especially in the vocals, bring the gloomy states of atmosphere close to the moods of Procupine Tree, even Opeth. The occasional implant of modern sound loops, as extra “filler” in the spectrum of the sonic picture, brings the atmosphere close to the one that also outlines the artistry of the modern Polish prog metallers Riverside. The sharpness of the riffing and the central placement of the guitar phrase in the production, though, keep Haken on the shore of the bands that fall under the emblem of progressive metal.
“Visions” is an album that will instantly grab all fans of progressive metal and rock adventurism and carry them off to the realm of dreams. And the dreams will last a long time. It’s an album that demands your full attention so it can touch you fully! Anyone who knows “Aquarius” will fall instantly and irrevocably for “Visions” too. It’s a concept album that puts the individual and their perception of the meaning of life and death at the center. It feels even gloomier than the concept of its predecessor, with an even fuller and more mature effect. “Visions” is a solid bone of musical eclecticism that prog fans will be gnawing on for a long time. All of you. Those of you looking for fierce, by-the-book, note-perfect defiance of proper instrumentation, as well as the more demanding music gourmets who catch fire on powerfully predatory atmosphere, as the multifaceted language of Haken (re)creates it. Through an inexhaustible wellspring of bold musical experiment. “Visions”, with its provocatively modern approach, takes the reach of prog artistry to a new level! Haken have proven with it that they’re no flash in the pan, and that they have the potential, over the next few years, to freely push the expressive reach of the established standards of the highest forms of modern prog metal up to an even higher level. A band, then, that to some extent dictates the development of one branch of this most richly varied genre on the planet, where absolutely every experiment is “allowed”.
Line-up
Ross Jennings – vocals
Charles Griffiths – guitar
Richard Henshall – keyboards, guitar
Diego Tejeida – keyboards
Thomas MacLean – bass guitar
Raymond Hearne – drums
Production
Haken
Track list
1. Premonition (4:10)
2. Nocturnal Conspiracy (13:08)
3. Insomnia (6:06)
4. The Mind’s Eye (4:05)
5. Portals (5:27)
6. Shapeshifter (8:08)
7. Deathless (8:04)
8. Visions (22:25)
